Jonathan Franzen Quotes
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.
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.
Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.
Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.
It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
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.
Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
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.
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.
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.
There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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.
Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
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.
...She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.
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.
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.
I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.
Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.
