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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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" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

Should

Child

Editor

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book. "

" 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 hate that word dysfunction. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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'm a poor person who has money. "

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

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

" I'm not a sexist. "

Jonathan Franzen

Sexist

" Manhattan is just all bank branches. "

" 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? "

" 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 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. "

" 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 hate Whole Foods. "

" 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. "

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