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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.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Television
Stake
Social
Stakes
Heart
Killed
Camera
Cameras
Draws
Novel
Reportage
Serious
Portraiture

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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
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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'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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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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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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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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So, what, you got cigarette burns, too? Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, It's nothing. Self-inflicted. You pathetic American. Different kind of prison Chip said.
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