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I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Writing
Nowadays
Going
Concerned
Dead
Books
Reading
Culture
Happens
Book

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I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.
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Robin turned and looked straight into her. What's life for? I don't know. I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.
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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
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Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.
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It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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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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[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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Popularity has become its own justification.
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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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But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
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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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Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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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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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 was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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