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I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
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Confess
Part
Trends
Take
Clearly
Feel
Seriously
Feels
Writers
Among
Taking
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Trend

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Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
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I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.
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I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.
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Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.
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You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
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I'd be surprised if non-fiction writers hate to be interviewed. We all hate them, because there's really nothing to say except Read the book. Right? At least with non-fiction, you can kind of convey some information, and people can decide for themselves whether they want more of that kind of information. But with a novel, what am I going to do
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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[T]o love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
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When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
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Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of I. I can't stop it. I'm writing this.
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