Top 100 Jonathan Franzen Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'
Candice Accola
#3. The life story of the five main characters and the secondary characters around them allows Jonathan Franzen to present the full impetus and extent of the world picture of the West at the end of the 20th century.
Batya Gur
#4. I don't watch a huge amount of telly. I read a lot. I'm reading at the moment 'Freedom,' by Jonathan Franzen, a great big brick of a book, and I'm loving it.
Nick Clegg
#5. Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.
Jess Row
#6. I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom.' Would I make that into a film? I think it's better suited to television. That would very much be a dialogue and performance piece, and it would take some very skilful direction - but not my kind of directing. But I thought it was a real literary work.
Peter Weir
#7. Jonathan Franzen seems like the grumpiest guy, and he doesn't seem to like much of anything, so I really don't care what he has to say.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#8. I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.
Emily Perkins
#9. You can think of me thinking of you, because that's what I'll be doing whenever you think of me.
Jonathan Franzen
#12. It was Andreas's gift, maybe his greatest, to find singular
Jonathan Franzen
#13. It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.
Jonathan Franzen
#14. As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.
Jonathan Franzen
#15. 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
#16. I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
Jonathan Franzen
#17. 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
#18. There are few things harder to imagine than other people's conversations about yourself.
Jonathan Franzen
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.
Jonathan Franzen
#22. 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
#23. The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.
Jonathan Franzen
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. There's hardly anybody who doesn't hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn't hate.
Jonathan Franzen
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. How, by the logic of addiction, could we not have proceeded to the needle and the vein?
Jonathan Franzen
#30. 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
#31. Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
Jonathan Franzen
#32. 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
#34. 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
#35. She noted with pleasure that he'd already dispensed with a salutation,
Jonathan Franzen
#36. Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Jonathan Franzen
#37. And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions.
Jonathan Franzen
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
Jonathan Franzen
#42. 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
#43. It was better to be angry than to be hurt; maybe even better than being loved and held by him, because maybe anger was what she'd been feeling toward him all along, anger disguised as wanting.
Jonathan Franzen
#44. Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I dont see how you could stand it psychologically.
Jonathan Franzen
#45. She quickly discovered that the world is divided into people who know how to be comfortable by themselves on a bar chair and people who do not.
Jonathan Franzen
#46. This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
Jonathan Franzen
#47. Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.
Jonathan Franzen
#48. Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit (402).
Jonathan Franzen
#49. A candle is like a small sun, but the sun is like a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identifications of naming.
Jonathan Franzen
#50. When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.
Jonathan Franzen
#51. The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there's no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
Jonathan Franzen
#52. I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
Jonathan Franzen
#53. What happened in the virtual world, where beauty existed for the purpose of being hated and besmirched, was more compelling than what happened in the real world, where beauty seemed to have no purpose at all.
Jonathan Franzen
#54. It had to be possible to do better than her parents, but she wasn't sure she would.
Jonathan Franzen
#56. But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.
Jonathan Franzen
#58. Not only had Mr. Butcavage's questions been reasonable, he also had an unfortunate name and no friends in his neighborhood. He was probably a lonely person like her mother, and Pip felt helplessly compassionate toward anyone who reminded her of her mother.
Jonathan Franzen
#60. The one thing everyone in the Republic had plenty of was time. Whatever you didn't do today really could be put off until tomorrow.
Jonathan Franzen
#61. It seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten.
Jonathan Franzen
#62. The only decoration on the gray segments of her cubicle was a bumper sticker, AT LEAST THE WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT IS GOING WELL. Her colleagues' cubicles were covered with photos
Jonathan Franzen
#63. It didn't feel so bad to be an orphan. It felt like the first day of a long vacation, a day as empty as the January sky was clear and sunny.
Jonathan Franzen
#64. Although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted to be had, like an animal: in a mute mutual privacy of violence.
Jonathan Franzen
#65. Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
Jonathan Franzen
#66. You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction - no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.
Jonathan Franzen
#67. Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness."
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
Jonathan Franzen
#68. It was heartbreaking to see old Ossis trying to ape the thinking of Wessis, trying to master the lingo of capitalist self-promotion.
Jonathan Franzen
#69. Deploring other people
their lack of perfection
had always been our sport.
Jonathan Franzen
#70. 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
#71. Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
Jonathan Franzen
#72. Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date.
Jonathan Franzen
#73. I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.
Jonathan Franzen
#74. Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.
Jonathan Franzen
#75. My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.
Jonathan Franzen
#76. And this of course, was the simplest definition of depression that he knew of: strongly disliking yourself.
Jonathan Franzen
#77. He wasn't constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world.
Jonathan Franzen
#78. When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger's biochemistry.
Jonathan Franzen
#80. Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society - to help solve our contemporary problems - seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?
Jonathan Franzen
#81. 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.
Jonathan Franzen
#82. Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.
Jonathan Franzen
#84. If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence.
Jonathan Franzen
#85. And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
Jonathan Franzen
#86. Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
Jonathan Franzen
#87. Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.
Jonathan Franzen
#88. The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
Jonathan Franzen
#89. Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact.
The family was the house's soul.
Jonathan Franzen
#90. Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal.
Jonathan Franzen
#91. The cold breeze and the cold of Richard's Camel were mixing like joy and remorse.
Jonathan Franzen
#92. 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?
Jonathan Franzen
#93. Google and Accurint can make you feel very smart, but the best stories come when you're out in the field.
Jonathan Franzen
#94. You on the floor in a fugue state, me not knowing what to do. It's remarkable how high-functioning you are, for an insane person. I'm the only one who gets to see you on the floor.
Jonathan Franzen
#96. Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I'm never sure which term is appropriate." "Call it all three if you want," Andreas said. "Chutzpah. That's a fourth term.
Jonathan Franzen
#98. Stevia does something funny to the chemistry of my mouth. There's no fooling a taste bud, in my experience.
Jonathan Franzen
#99. What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he'd figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.
Jonathan Franzen
#100. She saw a planet on which there were still seventeen thousand nukes, probably enough to wipe vertebrate life off the face of it, and thought This can't be good.
Jonathan Franzen
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