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" It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it? "

Jonathan Franzen

Book

Nice

Looking Back

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" I'm not fussy about my food. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats. "

" 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 hate Whole Foods. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" I hate that word dysfunction. "

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

" Manhattan is just all bank branches. "

" I'm not a sexist. "

Jonathan Franzen

Sexist

" 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. "

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

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

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