Best Jonathan Franzen Quotes

#1. And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions.

Jonathan Franzen

#2. How, by the logic of addiction, could we not have proceeded to the needle and the vein?

Jonathan Franzen

#3. She'd visited the Continent five times on vacation and twice on business trips with Alfred, so about a dozen times altogether, and to friends planning tours of Spain or France she now liked to say, with a sigh, that she'd had her fill of the place.

Jonathan Franzen

#4. I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

Gabrielle Zevin

#5. Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

Jonathan Franzen

#6. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.

Jonathan Franzen

#7. Popularity has become its own justification.

Jonathan Franzen

#8. Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

Jonathan Franzen

#9. She noted with pleasure that he'd already dispensed with a salutation,

Jonathan Franzen

#10. Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

Jonathan Franzen

#11. He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.

Jonathan Franzen

#12. Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.

Jonathan Franzen

#13. The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

Jonathan Franzen

#14. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

#16. Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

Jonathan Franzen

#17. Google and Accurint can make you feel very smart, but the best stories come when you're out in the field.

Jonathan Franzen

#18. Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.

Jonathan Franzen

#19. It was exceedingly improbable that he would ever see the men again, but, as my father said, you never knew. Always worth approaching every man you met as if he might become your best friend in the world.

Jonathan Franzen

#20. Her house was the heavy (but not indefinitely heavy) and sturdy (but not everlasting) God that she'd loved and served and been sustained by.

Jonathan Franzen

#21. But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.

Jonathan Franzen

#22. Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life.

Jonathan Franzen

#23. It was Andreas's gift, maybe his greatest, to find singular

Jonathan Franzen

#24. It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.

Jonathan Franzen

#25. As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.

Jonathan Franzen

#26. The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.

Jonathan Franzen

#27. I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.

Jonathan Franzen

#28. 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

#29. There are few things harder to imagine than other people's conversations about yourself.

Jonathan Franzen

#30. You can think of me thinking of you, because that's what I'll be doing whenever you think of me.

Jonathan Franzen

#31. Hell-o-oh," she called with the silly lilt with which she and Tom announced arrivals. "Hello," Tom called from the living room, without the lilt.

Jonathan Franzen

#32. The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.

Jonathan Franzen

#33. With whiskey, the capillary bloom was more diffusely rosy than with gin and less purple than with wine. Every university dinner party was a study in blooms.

Jonathan Franzen

#34. The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.

Jonathan Franzen

#35. Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?"
"I don't know."
"I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.

Jonathan Franzen

#36. 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

#37. There's hardly anybody who doesn't hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn't hate.

Jonathan Franzen

#38. Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.

Jonathan Franzen