391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure...

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

Even then, when the hike was perfect, I would wonder, ‘Now what?’ And take a picture. Take another picture. Like a man with a photogenic girlfriend he didn’t love.

Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive’s sake.

The New Regime even recycled the old Republic’s buzzwords, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging.

You’re either reading a book or you’re not.

His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he’d done.

Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person’s, and singularities like this are where you find eternity.