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" A big part of me would be very proud never having anything of mine adapted, because if you want the real experience, there's only one way to get it. You're going to actually have to be a reader. "

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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. "

Jonathan Franzen

Doing

Find

Hard

" The technology I like is the American paperback edition of 'Freedom.' I can spill water on it, and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. "

" I defy anyone to finish Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' without wetting the pages with tears. "

" I'm not a sexist. "

Jonathan Franzen

Sexist

" The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. Their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we're not the measure of all things. "

" There used to be rather serious firewalls between the artist and the buying public - the gallery, the publisher. And technology demolishes that wall and basically says, 'Self-promote or die.' And that is a bad head for any sort of artist to be forced into. "

" If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation. "

" I'm not fussy about my food. "

" I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994. "

" Manhattan is just all bank branches. "

" It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council. "

Jonathan Franzen

Plot

Step

" I hate Whole Foods. "

" 's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling. "

" I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself. "

" I don't dislike people; I love people. "

" The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need. "

" To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison. "

" I am not somebody who goes around saying men are superior or that male writers are superior. In fact, I really go out of my way to champion women's work that I think is not getting enough attention. None of that is ever enough. Because a villain is needed. It's like there's no way to make myself not male. "

" Most of the people who have complaints with me aren't reading me. "

" I hate that word dysfunction. "

" I think cultures of conformity produce vast quantities of shame, both in people who simply can't conform and people who do conform, but underneath, they're not feeling conformist. "

" For most of my life, I didn't pay attention to birds. "

" But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny. "

" 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. "

" I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers. "

" I'm a poor person who has money. "

" One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it. "

" I hate the word 'partner' so much. "

" I don't think I could live with someone that I didn't have an intellectual friendship with. "

" The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life. "