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" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

Champion

Women

Myself

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 had a brief period of questioning whether I should perhaps adopt a child. And my New Yorker editor, Henry Finder, was horrified by the notion. "

" I'm not a sexist. "

Jonathan Franzen

Sexist

" I hate that word dysfunction. "

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

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

People

Life

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

Way

Experience

" Manhattan is just all bank branches. "

" I'm not fussy about my food. "

" 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. "

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

" I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I don't even read positive reviews unless they are absolutely certified by eight different people to not contain one thing that could upset me. "

" 'The Man Who Loved Children,' Christina Stead's masterpiece, remains the most fabulous book that hardly anyone I know has read. "

" If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person - a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people - I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person. "