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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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" 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

Life

Book

Time

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I'm not a sexist. "

Jonathan Franzen

Sexist

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Manhattan is just all bank branches. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

" I'm a poor person who has money. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

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

" I hate Whole Foods. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 hate that word dysfunction. "

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