Jonathan Franzen Quotes

Nowadays there is really only one habit of highly effective people: Don't fall behind with email.

Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.

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.

His resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained.

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.

I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.

Weak people hold grudges, Mom. Strong people forgive.

When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.

Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date.

He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.

My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.

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

An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it's absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.

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

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.

His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.

Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

She'd been drinking jug wine steadily for four hours.

We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.

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

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

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

Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married.

I'm just happy you're home safely.

What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so happy to live in

He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.

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

The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.

Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

Everyone thinks they have strict limits," she said, "until they cross them.

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her.

Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside.

She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all.

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

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

She was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

It's like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.

[H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.]

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

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.

I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but

Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal.

In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.

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.

Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it.

The American middle-class appetite for illegal drugs provided the capital to build some of the most sophisticated and effective companies on earth.

My chances with moral vanity," Stephen interrupted, "when the alternative is

Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'The Sun Also Rises.' But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length.

It was as if the bones and veins were working their way to the surface; as if the skin were water receding to expose shapes at the bottom of a harbor.

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

You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.

She felt as if, while working and sleeping and working and sleeping, she'd aged so rapidly that she'd passed Emile and caught up with her parents.

Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?

Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.

He knows how love blinds people to the truth about the one they are in love with.

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can't really multitask reading a book.

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

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

[Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved

He wasn't constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world.

Around her ribs and waist were curves of the kind that wind carves in snowdrifts.

Her body looked to be only a healthy diet and some regular exercise away from greatness,

The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners,

This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of "I". I can't stop it. I'm writing this.

Alfred believed that the real and the true were a minority that the world was bent on exterminating.

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

Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.

You seem a little challenged in the entitlement department. I mean, compared to the others.

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.

Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head.

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

Edith Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn't pretty.

An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.

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.

The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.

Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit (402).

He operated by Old World rules, the blurring of right and wrong into whatever you could get away with;

And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.

And this of course, was the simplest definition of depression that he knew of: strongly disliking yourself.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy.

Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose,

Now Connie seemed to be suggesting that what made people complain about stupidity was their own stupidity.

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

It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.

She was like a bank too big in her mother's economy to fail,

The writer's life is a life of revisions.

Popularity has become its own justification.

Compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

Deploring other people
their lack of perfection
had always been our sport.

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

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.

The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.

Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.