Jonathan Franzen famous quotes

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 are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Real #Animal #Years

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.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Writing #Character #Thinking

I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Heart #Thinking #Trying

I think we live in an era of problems that, if you step back and look at them globally, can't be solved. One response to that is, "Oh well, it's all hopeless. The natural world is getting wrecked, birds are disappearing, the planet is warming and so anything we might do on a smaller scale is meaningless."
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Thinking #Bird #Looks

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 responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Writing #Decision #Scary

If you look at the New Testament, it's a gospel of love. Yes, there's talk of judgement and there's talk of heaven and there's talk of people not getting into heaven, but it doesn't seem to me that the fundamental message of the gospels was one of guilt and retribution so much as love.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#People #Heaven #Judgement

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Writing #Connections #Fiction

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

#Funny #Witty #Falling In Love

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#People #Depth #Novel

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Animal #Opportunity #Brain

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Integrity #Reading #Intellectual

Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Technology #Mirrors #People

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Philadelphia #Manhattan #Brooklyn

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Solitude #Fiction #Problem

We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Suffering #May #Freak

How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Running #Negative #Said

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 to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Comfort #Succeed #Tribes

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

#Reading #Lessons #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.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Morning #Pain #Sadness

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Dream #Personality #Limitless

You're either reading a book or you're not.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Book #Reading

Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Becoming

It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value...
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Light #Age #Littles

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.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Believe #Serious #Fiction

His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Hurt #Awake #Tiredness

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

#Data #Government #Self

Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence -- the drama of being her -- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Drama #Eye #Challenges

Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit” (402).
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Bullshit

Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Summer #Short Life #Self

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Integrity #Hyenas #Values

Deploring other people--their lack of perfection--had always been our sport.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Sports #People #Perfection

He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Figures #Messed Up #Wells

she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Ideas #Personality #Littles

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.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Opposites #Games #Sake

Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying," Van replied, with surprisingly little anger. "It's a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Ideas #Littles #Pity

The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Pain #News #Stories

This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Comforting #Contradictory #Chosen

He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.
-- Jonathan Franzen

#Hurt #Wanted