Jonathan Franzen Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Jonathan Franzen on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.
Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
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
The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.
Compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.
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.
Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
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.
Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Now Connie seemed to be suggesting that what made people complain about stupidity was their own stupidity.
The American middle-class appetite for illegal drugs provided the capital to build some of the most sophisticated and effective companies on earth.
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.
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.
I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
It's like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.
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 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.
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.
Alfred believed that the real and the true were a minority that the world was bent on exterminating.
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.
The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.
Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.
Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?
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.
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.