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

Jonathan Franzen

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" We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally. "

Jonathan Franzen

" 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

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

" I'm not a sexist. "

Jonathan Franzen

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

" 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

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen

" 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. "

Jonathan Franzen