391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

Popularity has become its own justification.

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.

You see more sitting still than chasing after.

Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.

When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.

You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction-no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.

The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than 'The Meta­morphosis'.