Best Jonathan Franzen Quotes & Sayings

She has embarrassingly inquired, of her children, whether there's a woman in his life, and has rejoiced at hearing no. Not because she doesn't want him to be happy, not because she has any right or even much inclination to be jealous anymore, but because it means there's some shadow of a chance that he still thinks, as she does more than ever, that they were not just the worst thing that ever happened to each other, they were also the best thing. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. — Jonathan Franzen

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

young gentleman with whom she's been osculating on — Jonathan Franzen

Even then, when the hike was perfect, I would wonder, 'Now what?' And take a picture. Take another picture. Like a man with a photogenic girlfriend he didn't love. — Jonathan Franzen

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

Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper ... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies. — Jonathan Franzen

What happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels? — Jonathan Franzen

Dad, Dad, Dad. What's wrong?" Alfred looked up at his son and into his eyes. He opened his mouth, but the only word he could produce was "I - " I - I have made mistakes - I am alone - I am wet - I want to die - I am sorry - I did my best - I love my children - I need your help - I want to die - "I can't be here," he said. — Jonathan Franzen

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

If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I'll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I'd been trying to do, was a real revelation. — Jonathan Franzen

Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart's getting crushed or exalted, even when you're absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there comes these moments when you're aware that what's happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You're miserable and ashamed if you don't believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you're stupid if you do. — Jonathan Franzen

In the kitchen Enid dredged the Promethean meat in flour and laid it in a Westinghouse electric pan large enough to fry nine eggs in ticktacktoe formation. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season's rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn't work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn't affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement ... — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies. — Jonathan Franzen

He blamed her both for liking his mother and for — Jonathan Franzen

Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That's what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that's kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn't. — Jonathan Franzen

Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am. — Jonathan Franzen

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. — Jonathan Franzen

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

I hate that word dysfunction. — Jonathan Franzen

What he'd never understood about men in his position, in all the books he'd read and movies he'd seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good. — Jonathan Franzen

We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power. — Jonathan Franzen

Respectless and depraved, maybe. But happily respectless, happily depraved. — Jonathan Franzen

because, no matter how he'd come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes. — Jonathan Franzen

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

Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred. — Jonathan Franzen

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

Our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it's out of control, it's not computers that are making everything virtual, it's mental health. Everyone's trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to, — Jonathan Franzen

She had to tell him, while she still had time, how wrong he'd been and how right she'd been. How wrong not to love her more, how wrong not to cherish her and have sex at every opportunity, how wrong not to trust her financial instincts, how wrong to have spent so much time at work and so little with the children, how wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes: she had to tell him all of this, every single day. — Jonathan Franzen

There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness. — Jonathan Franzen

She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas. — Jonathan Franzen

He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking. — Jonathan Franzen

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

He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others. — Jonathan Franzen

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

There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She — Jonathan Franzen