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Popularity has become its own justification.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Justification
Become
Popularity

More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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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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The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.
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His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
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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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The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
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Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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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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I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.
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This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of I. I can't stop it. I'm writing this.
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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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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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
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Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.
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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 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.
Jonathan Franzen