Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

About Jonathan Franzen:

Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel, The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist".
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay it down to sleep. He didn't understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had bee...

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 ...

Jonathan Franzen

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 n...

Jonathan Franzen

You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade.

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it. He bowed his head at the thought of how much strengt...

Jonathan Franzen

If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, all that registered was something dark flashing by. But if you happened to be gazing directly at the window in question and you happened as well to be f...

Jonathan Franzen

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

Jonathan Franzen

You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction—no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and ...

Jonathan Franzen

It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

Jonathan Franzen

What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so happy to live in

Jonathan Franzen

She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.

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 sati...

Jonathan Franzen

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...

Jonathan Franzen

There’s hardly anybody who doesn’t hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn’t hate.

Jonathan Franzen

El amor consiste en una empatía ilimitada, surgida de lo que el corazón nos revela, que el otro es tan real como nosotros. Y por eso el amor, según lo entiendo, siempre es concreto. Intentar amar a toda la humanidad puede ser una empresa loable, p...

Jonathan Franzen

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from human...

Jonathan Franzen

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

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 - ...

Jonathan Franzen

's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling.

Jonathan Franzen

Author Bio

  • NameJonathan Franzen
  • Descriptionnovelist
  • BornAugust 17, 1959
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionNovelist; Writer; Essayist
  • WorksThe Corrections; Freedom
  • AwardsHonorary Degree; Guggenheim Fellowship; James Tait Black Memorial Prize; National Book Award