391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews?" "Basically everything, except technical proficiency," Walter said. "Right." "But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. 'Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't live without my freedom, yeah yeah.' That's pretty much every song.

His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.

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?

Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value...

If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.

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.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.” (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)