Jonathan Franzen Quotes

She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever...

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should th...

Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That'...

there are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself.

the weekly thirty minutes of sexual stress was a chronic but low-grade discomfort, like the humidity...

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

My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement w...

I think the iPod is the true face of Republican politics, and I’m in favor of the music industry … s...

Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they s...

The reason they outperformed her was that they accepted each new “product” without trying to underst...

Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honoring her covenant with Charles, Tom's a...

[H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.]

The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about it...

[P]art of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn't thi...

It's nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it's q...

There was no arguing with blood.

In Technology We Trust. Need to put that on the new hundred-dollar bill.

I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal a...

Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences ...

There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that ...

He was certifiably insane, an Ayn Rander who fancied himself an Übermensch and “the Singularity’s ch...

It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.

By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and l...

You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him f...

You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant the...

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

The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying,...

THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gent...

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring w...

Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England win...

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

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

If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, al...

She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.

What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so ha...

There’s hardly anybody who doesn’t hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn’t hate.

The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves ...

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through...ringing throughout the house was an ala...

We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the vi...

If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don’t see a...

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

Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. ...

Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for it...

The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indiffere...

... It happened very fast. And now that he's dead he can't remember pain. It's as if he'd never exis...

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

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike pur...

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rot...

Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to he...

In order to justify their claim on our attention, the organs of mass culture and information are com...

You're either reading a book or you're not.

An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it's absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as...

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bi...

And yet the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, ...

Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesti...

When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.

And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed...

Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I a...

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectu...

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

How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn'...

Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.

In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going throu...