J Franzen Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
[Ten rules for writing fiction, The Guardian, 20 February 2010 (with Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, and AL Kennedy)] — P.D. James

I hate that word dysfunction. — Jonathan Franzen

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

For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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