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" I hate that word dysfunction. "
Jonathan Franzen
Dysfunction
Word
Hate
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" 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. "
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" I hate the word 'partner' so much. "
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" And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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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. "
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" 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. "
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" 's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling. "
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" Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling, and who hurries out to see a golden plover that's been reported in the neighbourhood, just because it's a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska. "
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" 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. "
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" I hate Whole Foods. "
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" 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. "
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Father
Look
" I'm a poor person who has money. "
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" I defy anyone to finish Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' without wetting the pages with tears. "
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Independent
" 'The Man Who Loved Children,' Christina Stead's masterpiece, remains the most fabulous book that hardly anyone I know has read. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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Conversation
You
Talk
" 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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" 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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" 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. "
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Birds
Earth
" The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need. "
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Pleasure
" I don't think I could live with someone that I didn't have an intellectual friendship with. "
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" Most of the people who have complaints with me aren't reading me. "
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Complaints
People
Reading
" For most of my life, I didn't pay attention to birds. "
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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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Life
" 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. "
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" We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally. "
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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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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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