391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover.

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

The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.

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?

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

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.