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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Funny
Really
Think
Thinking
Barry
Dave
Popular
Yeah

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
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The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?
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Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
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I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.
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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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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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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.
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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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Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
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I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.
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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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It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change certain things end. People you know die.
Jonathan Franzen
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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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Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.
Jonathan Franzen
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I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.
Jonathan Franzen
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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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