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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Feel
Feels
Armchair
Armchairs
Environmentalists
Environmentalist
Happier
Main
Working

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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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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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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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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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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.
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How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
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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.
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It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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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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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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[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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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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