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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

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Right
Fiction
Going
Information
Interviewed
Kind
Least
Convey
Really
Whether
Surprised
People
Read
Decide
Hate
Writers
Book
Except
Nothing
Novel

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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.
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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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Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.
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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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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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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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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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Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
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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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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
Jonathan Franzen
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Jonathan Franzen
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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
Jonathan Franzen
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
Jonathan Franzen