Jonathan Franzen Quotes

132 quotes in 2094 categories

• Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
• 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…
• [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…
• Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
• If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced…
• How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the…
• 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…
• Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward,…
• If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.
• The writer’s life is a life of revisions.
• When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems…
• 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…
• Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose,
• The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than 'The Meta­morphosis'.
• The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make…
• Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write…
• Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly,…
• 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…
• Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I dont see how you could stand…
• 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…

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