Jonathan Franzen Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Jonathan Franzen's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Novelist Jonathan Franzen's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 144 quotes on this page collected since August 17, 1959! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.

    Hurt   Wanted  
    Jonathan Franzen (2001). “The Corrections: A Novel”, p.266, Macmillan
  • When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.

    People   Way   Weirdness  
  • It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.

    Plot   Steps   Realizing  
  • I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.

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

    Jonathan Franzen (2001). “The Corrections: A Novel”, p.324, Macmillan
  • Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.

    Loyalty   Pages   Logic  
  • I try to write things that can't be made into movies. My novels have thwarted many attempts to film them and I think that was true of the essay, too. If you'd actually tried to be true to the essay, it would have been, perhaps, boring. So taking that narrow little cast of characters and expanding it out, that was what was exciting about the project for me.

    "Exclusive: Jonathan Franzen sounds off on bird poaching, climate change and 'performing love'". Interview with Lindsay Abrams, www.salon.com. April 27, 2015.
  • Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

    Integrity   Hyenas   Pure  
    Jonathan Franzen (2010). “Freedom: A Novel”, p.230, Macmillan
  • I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.

    Believe   Fiction   World  
    Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.73, Macmillan
  • The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

    Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.65, Macmillan
  • Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure.

  • She wondered: How could people respond to these images if images didn't secretly enjoy the same status as real things? Not that images were so powerful, but that the world was so weak. It could be read, certainly, in its weakness, as on days when the sun baked fallen apples in orchards and the valley smelled like cider, and cold nights when Jordan had driven Chadds Ford for dinner and the tires of her Chevrolet had crunched on the gravel driveway; but the world was fungible only as images. Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

    Powerful   Real   Night  
  • Even in an intensely mediated world, in a world that offers at least the illusion of radical self-invention and radical freedom of choice, I as a novelist am drawn to the things you can't get away from. Because much of the promise of radical self-invention, of defining yourself through this marvelous freedom of choice, it's just a lie. It's a lie that we all buy into, because it helps the economy run.

    Running   Lying   Self  
    Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 1, 2010.
  • Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals' lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it's true heart lay...cats were all about using people

    Jonathan Franzen (2010). “Freedom: A Novel”, p.548, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

    Book   Way   Firsts  
  • 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 being broken.

    Morning   Pain   Sadness  
    Jonathan Franzen (2010). “Freedom: A Novel”, p.158, Macmillan
  • You're either reading a book or you're not.

    Book   Reading  
    "Jonathan Franzen Blasts Author Videos ... In His Own Author Video", www.huffingtonpost.com. August 16, 2010.
  • 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.

    Book   Reading   Novel  
    "Jonathan Franzen Blasts Author Videos ... In His Own Author Video". www.huffingtonpost.com. August 16, 2010.
  • 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 these particular species to disappear.

    Thinking   Bird   Want  
  • Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose.

    "Jonathan Franzen: 'Twitter is the ultimate irresponsible medium'" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. March 7, 2012.
  • Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.

    Opposites   Games   Alive  
  • The writer’s life is a life of revisions.

  • 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.

    Spring   Real   Book  
  • Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.

  • 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.

    Book   Reading   Writing  
  • The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis".

    "Ten rules for writing fiction" by Jonathan Franzen, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.
  • I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

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

    Jonathan Franzen (2010). “Freedom: A Novel”, p.447, Macmillan
  • And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

    Smart   Book   Silence  
    "The Passion of the Oprah" by Macy Halford, www.newyorker.com. September 17, 2010.
  • Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 144 quotes from the Novelist Jonathan Franzen, starting from August 17, 1959! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!