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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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Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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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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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
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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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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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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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It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
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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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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
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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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This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
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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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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on 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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You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
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