Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

— Jonathan Franzen

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

— 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

“The dream of radical transformation: of one day waking up and finding himself a wholly different (more confident, more serene) kind of…

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

“Once a killer, always a killer.”

— Jonathan Franzen

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world…

— Jonathan Franzen

I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

— Jonathan Franzen

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things…

— 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

I hate that word dysfunction.

— Jonathan Franzen

Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and…

— Jonathan Franzen

Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary…

— Jonathan Franzen

“When I see an actress or actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial…

— Jonathan Franzen

“There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside…

— Jonathan Franzen

“Taking a cab to the city center, she was pierced unexpectedly by regret for not doing exactly that: not walking the streets…

— Jonathan Franzen

“The guiding principle of Martin’s personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those…

— Jonathan Franzen

I defy anyone to finish Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' without wetting the pages with tears.

— Jonathan Franzen

She wondered: How could people respond to these images if images didn't secretly enjoy the same status as real things? Not that…

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

“Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture in his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise,…

— Jonathan Franzen

Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

— Jonathan Franzen