Jonathan Franzen Quotes

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

[T]o love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

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

The writer’s life is a life of revisions.

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.

I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.

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.

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.

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

I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.

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.

I admire your capacity for admiring.

Use well thy freedom.

I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.

I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

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.

When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.

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.

Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.

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

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

As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again.

Popularity has become its own justification.

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

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

So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said.

[T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

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.

But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.

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.

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

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

Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.

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

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.

The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.

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

Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.

He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.

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.

I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.

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

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.

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

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through...ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly.

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

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

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