391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.

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.

I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?

I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.

I admire your capacity for admiring.

The writer’s life is a life of revisions.

If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.

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.