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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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" 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

Doing

Find

Hard

" I hate Whole Foods. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

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

" I'm not a sexist. "

Jonathan Franzen

Sexist

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

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

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

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

" 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

" 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'm not fussy about my food. "

" 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 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 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. "

" Manhattan is just all bank branches. "

" 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. "