Jonathan Franzen Quotes
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I had a brief period of questioning whether I should perhaps adopt a child. And my New Yorker editor, Henry Finder, was horrified by the notion.
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The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.
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I'm not a sexist.
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I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.
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It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.
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'The Man Who Loved Children,' Christina Stead's masterpiece, remains the most fabulous book that hardly anyone I know has read.
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We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
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's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling.
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Manhattan is just all bank branches.
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I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.
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The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.
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If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person - a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people - I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.
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I think cultures of conformity produce vast quantities of shame, both in people who simply can't conform and people who do conform, but underneath, they're not feeling conformist.
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For most of my life, I didn't pay attention to birds.
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I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
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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.
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A big part of me would be very proud never having anything of mine adapted, because if you want the real experience, there's only one way to get it. You're going to actually have to be a reader.
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I don't dislike people; I love people.
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I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.
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I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.
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I'm not fussy about my food.
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But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.
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I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
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I don't think I could live with someone that I didn't have an intellectual friendship with.