15 Jonathan Franzen Quotes

Jonathan Franzen quotes

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

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

3. Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.

1. Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I dont see how you could stand it psychologically.

2. 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.

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

4. A big part of me would be very proud never having anything of mine adapted, because if you want the real experience, there's only one way to get it. You're going to actually have to be a reader.

5. Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.

9. I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

10. The technology I like is the American paperback edition of 'Freedom.' I can spill water on it, and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology.

11. 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.

12. 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.