American - Novelist | August 17, 1959 -
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
PeopleIgnoreYouConversationWay
I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
MyselfInsanityLevelCertain
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.
BeautyValueBirdsMeasureNeverUs
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.
FamilyHopePeopleAmericanDoing
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.
TrainingFunBookTryingDownWay
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.
ExperiencePeopleThinkYouLoving
I know what paranoia is like. I know what it is like to worry about what people are saying about you and become obsessed with what people are saying about you.
PeopleSayingWorryYouKnowBecome
I defy anyone to finish Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' without wetting the pages with tears.
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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
OutFreakSufferMayLocally
The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.
MeWritingYouNeedRealPleasure
The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.
LifeMusicMy LifeKindBackground
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.
StepMeSecurityRealizeUpPlot
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