Jonathan Franzen Quotes

Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.

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

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

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

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

It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.

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

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

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

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

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

The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn't understand antiques or architecture, she couldn't draw like Sylvia, she didn't read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A paucity for love was the only true thing she'd ever had.

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

Du skal bare huske at det ikke er en perfekt krig i en perfekt verden.

She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.

It’s great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavour and you have to spend another buck.

THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.

The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.