391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

You can think of me thinking of you, because that’s what I’ll be doing whenever you think of me.

He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies.

As soon as she hit the Send button, she had a spasm of remorse; her interval between action and remorse was diminishing so rapidly that soon she might be all remorse, unable to act at all; which might not be such a bad thing.

Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He’d never stop asking, ‘Can I do this to you? Is this okay?

A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling.

As she left her parents’ neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen.

I suspect that art has always had a particularly tenuous purchase on the American imagination because ours is a country to which so few terrible things have ever happened.

If you’re interested in how people behave, if you’re interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it’s very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.