391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

I’m not too concerned what happens to my books after I’m dead. But I am very concerned by what’s going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.

It’s just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.

Essay’s roots are in literature, and literature at its best invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.

He wasn’t constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world.

The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn’t covetous, he wasn’t envious. But without money he was hardly a man.

She didn’t need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger.

Deploring other people – their lack of perfection – had always been our sport.

Nice people don’t necessarily fall in love with nice people.

Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?