Writers are Birds!

"The secret connection, I think, is that I sometimes feel like an endangered little bird – a species whose days on this earth are numbered. I like quiet, old-fashioned places. In Poland the farming industry is much less developed, and because it's poor, the landscape is full of birds. Flannery O'Connor once said that writers are unfortunately cheered by the fact that poverty will always exist because it means their kind won't die out. You don't get poorer than birds. Birds are so poor, they eat beetles."
Jonathan Franzen is now currently working on his new novel in Brandenburg near to the border to Poland. He tells Wieland Freund why he is both writer and ornithologist