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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Still
Quaint
Ink
Bottle
Symbol
Bottles
Symbols
Stills
Thinkable
Seems
Impossibly

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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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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 most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
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I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.
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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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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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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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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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Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.
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You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction-no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.
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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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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
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Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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