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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?

Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 17
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Jonathan Earl Franzen
Crisis
Reader
Novelist
Less
Impossibility
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Engaging
Energy
Engage
Culture
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More quotes by Jonathan Franzen

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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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I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.
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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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Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
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Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
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I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.
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Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
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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.
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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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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.
Jonathan Franzen
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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.
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When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.
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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 pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
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You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
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How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.
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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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