Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

I know what paranoia is like. I know what it is like to worry about what people are saying about you and become obsessed with what people are saying about you.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

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

I'm not a sexist.

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

I admire your capacity for admiring.

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.

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

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.

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

Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.

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.

His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.

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.)

I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her.

The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone.

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

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

He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.

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.

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.

Use well thy freedom.

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.

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