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This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of I. I can't stop it. I'm writing this.

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Forgive
Evening
Forgiving
Begin
Trust
Stop
Overuse
Anyone
Notebook
Writing
Reads

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He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.
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The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
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The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?
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There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
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I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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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.
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Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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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.
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I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.
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To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.
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It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.
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It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change certain things end. People you know die.
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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 satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.
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Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?
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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.
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I'd be surprised if non-fiction writers hate to be interviewed. We all hate them, because there's really nothing to say except Read the book. Right? At least with non-fiction, you can kind of convey some information, and people can decide for themselves whether they want more of that kind of information. But with a novel, what am I going to do
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