Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

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

You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

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

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.

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.

He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.

You're either reading a book or you're not.

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.

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.

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.

It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.

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.

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

'The Man Who Loved Children,' Christina Stead's masterpiece, remains the most fabulous book that hardly anyone I know has read.

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.

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?