110+ Jonathan Franzen Quotes On Realistic, Insightful And Satirical

Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. He is best known for his 2001 novel The Corrections, which earned him a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. His other works include The Twenty-Seventh City, Freedom, and Purity. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jonathan Franzen on love, realistic, insightful.

Top 10 Jonathan Franzen Quotes

1. 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.
2. It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
3. Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
4. Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
5. The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.
6. Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
7. The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.
8. 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?
9. What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.
10. Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!

Jonathan Franzen Short Quotes

• Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.
• We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
• It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
• His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
• I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
• And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.
• He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.
• I hate that word dysfunction.
• Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
• But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.

Jonathan Franzen Quotes About Love

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

What he'd never understood about men in his position, in all the books he'd read and movies he'd seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good. — Jonathan Franzen

But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things. — Jonathan Franzen

Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything. — Jonathan Franzen

[T]o 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. — Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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. — Jonathan Franzen

Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews?" "Basically everything, except technical proficiency," Walter said. "Right." "But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. 'Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't live without my freedom, yeah yeah.' That's pretty much every song. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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. — Jonathan Franzen

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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. — Jonathan Franzen

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. — Jonathan Franzen

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. — Jonathan Franzen

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. — Jonathan Franzen

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. — Jonathan Franzen

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. — Jonathan Franzen

It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it? — Jonathan Franzen

I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder. — Jonathan Franzen

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down. — Jonathan Franzen

Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are. — Jonathan Franzen

The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again. — Jonathan Franzen

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

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it. — Jonathan Franzen

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

When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists. — Jonathan Franzen

I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot? — Jonathan Franzen

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

This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of "I". I can't stop it. I'm writing this. — Jonathan Franzen

He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure. — Jonathan Franzen

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

So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said. — Jonathan Franzen

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? — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

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

He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air's buoyancy even for an hour: the trad was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird. — Jonathan Franzen

I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media. — Jonathan Franzen

Use well thy freedom. — Jonathan Franzen

Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal. — Jonathan Franzen

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

I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays. — Jonathan Franzen

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. — Jonathan Franzen

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money. — Jonathan Franzen

I admire your capacity for admiring. — Jonathan Franzen

Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning. — Jonathan Franzen

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

Even in an intensely mediated world, in a world that offers at least the illusion of radical self-invention and radical freedom of choice, I as a novelist am drawn to the things you can't get away from. Because much of the promise of radical self-invention, of defining yourself through this marvelous freedom of choice, it's just a lie. It's a lie that we all buy into, because it helps the economy run. — Jonathan Franzen

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it. — Jonathan Franzen

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

You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries. — Jonathan Franzen

Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.” (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.) — Jonathan Franzen

He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking. — Jonathan Franzen

The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture? — Jonathan Franzen

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator. — Jonathan Franzen

You see more sitting still than chasing after. — Jonathan Franzen

But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special. — Jonathan Franzen

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. — Jonathan Franzen

Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them. — Jonathan Franzen

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. — Jonathan Franzen

I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers. — Jonathan Franzen

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

An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970. — Jonathan Franzen

How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one. — Jonathan Franzen

As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again. — Jonathan Franzen

The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man. — Jonathan Franzen

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance. — Jonathan Franzen

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. — Jonathan Franzen

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

The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis". — Jonathan Franzen

Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage. — Jonathan Franzen

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

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

Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself. — Jonathan Franzen

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. — Jonathan Franzen

The figure of my father looms large in my imagination. — Jonathan Franzen

Life Lessons by Jonathan Franzen

1. Jonathan Franzen's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and accepting the complexities of human relationships.
2. His novels often explore the consequences of personal choices and the power of family dynamics.
3. Through his work, Franzen encourages readers to reflect on their own lives and relationships, and to strive for authenticity and connection in their lives.