Jonathan Franzen Quotes
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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 don't think I could live with someone that I didn't have an intellectual friendship with.
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I don't even read positive reviews unless they are absolutely certified by eight different people to not contain one thing that could upset me.
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Most of the people who have complaints with me aren't reading me.
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It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?
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One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it.
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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.
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The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. Their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we're not the measure of all things.
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I am not somebody who goes around saying men are superior or that male writers are superior. In fact, I really go out of my way to champion women's work that I think is not getting enough attention. None of that is ever enough. Because a villain is needed. It's like there's no way to make myself not male.
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To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
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I know what paranoia is like. I know what it is like to worry about what people are saying about you and become obsessed with what people are saying about you.
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There used to be rather serious firewalls between the artist and the buying public - the gallery, the publisher. And technology demolishes that wall and basically says, 'Self-promote or die.' And that is a bad head for any sort of artist to be forced into.
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The technology I like is the American paperback edition of 'Freedom.' I can spill water on it, and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology.
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I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover.
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I'm a poor person who has money.
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I defy anyone to finish Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' without wetting the pages with tears.
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I hate Whole Foods.
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I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.
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Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling, and who hurries out to see a golden plover that's been reported in the neighbourhood, just because it's a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska.
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And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.
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I hate that word dysfunction.
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It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.
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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.