Jonathan Franzen

I'm not a sexist.

— Jonathan Franzen

I'm not fussy about my food.

— Jonathan Franzen

I'm a poor person who has money.

— Jonathan Franzen

“Once a killer, always a killer.”

— Jonathan Franzen

Use well thy freedom.

— Jonathan Franzen

I hate Whole Foods.

— Jonathan Franzen

I hate that word dysfunction.

— Jonathan Franzen

Manhattan is just all bank branches.

— Jonathan Franzen

It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.

— Jonathan Franzen

You see more sitting still than chasing after.

— Jonathan Franzen

“No one stays haunted by a person they’re not still in love with.”

— Jonathan Franzen

I admire your capacity for admiring.

— Jonathan Franzen

“The infinite variety of human badness.”

— Jonathan Franzen

“Never been a washcloth user, no.”

— Jonathan Franzen

For most of my life, I didn't pay attention to birds.

— Jonathan Franzen

It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves…

— 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

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

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

“He ate arugula (“rocket,” the old farmers called it) so strong it made his eyes water, like a paragraph of Thoreau.”

— Jonathan Franzen

Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!

— Jonathan Franzen

“And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and…

— Jonathan Franzen

“You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food…

— Jonathan Franzen

“The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is…

— Jonathan Franzen

“They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of…

— Jonathan Franzen

I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said…

— Jonathan Franzen

“Believe me,' [...] 'I would know about it. That's the difference between me and your girlfriend. I am the jealous type. I…

— Jonathan Franzen

Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American…

— Jonathan Franzen

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels…

— Jonathan Franzen

Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews?" "Basically everything, except technical proficiency," Walter said. "Right." "But maybe especially the banality of…

— 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…

— Jonathan Franzen

“Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the…

— Jonathan Franzen

“I saw it all of a sudden. That whether I liked it or not, the survivor and the artist was me, not…

— Jonathan Franzen

“The truth is that nothing between Patty and Richard was ever going to last, because they couldn't help being disappointments to each…

— Jonathan Franzen

“After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and discovered that both prints were webbed over with…

— Jonathan Franzen

I am not somebody who goes around saying men are superior or that male writers are superior. In fact, I really go…

— Jonathan Franzen

“There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in…

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen