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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
People
Read
Decide
Hate
Writers
Book
Except
Nothing
Novel
Right
Fiction
Going
Information
Interviewed
Kind
Least
Convey
Really
Whether
Surprised

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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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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 most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than The Meta­morphosis.
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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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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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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 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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He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent it was the people who didn't get along well with others.
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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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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
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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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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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