Quotes About Franzen

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.

He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies.

There was a kind of liberation in jettisoning all thought of being a good person.

Wasn't asking for a recipe supposed to be good coin of the feminine realm?

She'd been drinking jug wine steadily for four hours.

And the proof of his insanity? His belief that the U.S. government was a repressive conspiracy that muzzled radical opinion. Only an insane person would believe that! The Unabomber had really, really liked Leila.

That his comments actually pertained to her questions—that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation—made up for the sourness in his face.

Worse than spanking or even liver was the sound of someone else's Ping-Pong.

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

Jonathan Franzen seems like the grumpiest guy, and he doesn't seem to like much of anything, so I really don't care what he has to say.

I don't even read positive reviews unless they are absolutely certified by eight different people to not contain one thing that could upset me.

Beneath all the chatter and the liturgy runs a fierce nostalgia for the literary myths of the past, for the gigantic figures of Dickens and Joyce, Hemingway and Faulkner. A writer can't even aim at that kind of aura today. But it's that yearning for imagined greatness that drives the whole literary enterprise. Plus the publishers' desperation to manufacture a bestseller to pay the bills. The idea of greatness is a marketing tool. See Franzen.