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.

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?

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

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

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

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

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

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.

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

I admire your capacity for admiring.

If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.

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

And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight-- isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before?

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.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

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

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

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.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.

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.

Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically.

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

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