Jonathan Franzen Quotes

“The fog is clearing; life is a matter of taste.”
― Frank Wedekind, Spring's Awakening

“The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away

“There are any number of reasons to want novels to survive. The way [Jonathan] Franzen thinks about it is that books can do things, socially useful things, that other media can't. He cites -- as one does -- the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his idea of busyness: that state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities and maintain self-deceptions. With the help of cell phones, e-mail and handheld games, it's easier to stay busy, in the Kierkegaardian sense, than it's ever been.

Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. "We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we've created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful," Franzen says. "The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.”
― Lev Grossman

“He [Wallace] sent a quick note to his friend [Franzen] explaining his behavior. "the bold fact is that I'm a little afraid of you right now,"[...] "all I can tell you is that I may have been that [a worthy opponent] for you a couple/ three years ago, and maybe 16 months or tow or 5 or 10 years hence, but right now I am a pathetic and very confused man, a failed writer at 28, who is so jealous, so sickly searing envious of you and Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David Fuckward Leavitt and any young man who is right now producing pages with which he can live and even approving them off some base-clause of conviction about the entrprise's meaning and end that I consider suicide a reasonable- if not at this point a desirable- option with respect to the whole wretched problem.”
― D.T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

“A publisher sent him a galley of a novel by a writer he had barely heard of, one that impressed him deeply and seemed to embody all the literary qualities he had called for in his "fictional Futures" essay. The book was Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City. Set in St. Louis, it mixed postmodernism and traditional storytelling and showed a familiarity its chosen city that Wallace could only marvel it. it decanted a Pynchonesque conspiracy in media-mediated language; it was about word AND the world, realism for an era when there was no real.”
― D.T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

“Con questo non voglio dire che il depresso e insicuro Charlie Brown, l’egoista e sadica Lucy, l’eccentrico filosofo Linus e l’ossessivo Schroeder (che soddisfa le sue ambizioni beethoveniane con un pianoforte giocattolo e una sola ottava) non siano tutti avatar di Schultz. Ma il suo vero alter ego è chiaramente Snoopy: l’imbroglione proteiforme che fonda la propria libertà sulla certezza di essere in fondo adorabile, il trasformista che, per puro divertimento, può diventare un elicottero, un giocatore di hokey o il Grande Brachetto, e poi di nuovo, in un lampo, prima che il suo virtuosismo possa annoiarvi o sminuirvi, tornare a essere il cagnolino vivace che aspetta solo la cena.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we‘re not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it‘ll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us — we won‘t stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn‘t follow. The dynamic lives in the writer‘s mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one [...]

PS [...] If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we‘re talking about when we use the word ‘identity‘ has reached an end.
– Don Delillo, in a letter to Jonathan Franzen”
― Don DeLillo

“His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he'd done.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“The shame and disorder in his house were like the shame and disorder in his head.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“E quando l'evento, il grosso cambiamento nella tua vita è semplicemente una presa di coscienza, non è strano? Non c'è assolutamente nulla di diverso, tranne il fatto che vedi le cose in un altro modo e di conseguenza sei meno impaurita e meno ansiosa e nel complesso più forte: non è sorprendente che una cosa completamente invisibile nella tua testa possa sembrarti più vera di qualunque altra cosa tu abbia mai provato prima?”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“Oh, il mito, l’infantile ottimismo delle riparazioni! La speranza che gli oggetti non si logorassero mai! La sciocca fiducia nel fatto che ci fosse sempre un futuro in cui lui, Alfred, non solo sarebbe stato vivo ma avrebbe anche avuto sufficiente energia per aggiustare le cose. La tacita convinzione che alla fine tutta la sua frugalità e la sua passione di conservatore avessero uno scopo, e che un giorno, svegliandosi, si sarebbe trasformato in una persona completamente diversa, con tempo ed energia infiniti per occuparsi di tutti gli oggetti che aveva conservato, per mantenere tutto funzionante, tutto a posto.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“I'm saying that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There's supposed to be some element of rebellion. That's how you define yourself as a person.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“Her life would have been easier if she hadn't loved him so much, but she couldn't help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“I had a private, intense relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a solitary not-animal animal who lived among larger creatures of a different species, which was more or less my feeling in my own house.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

“L’ignoranza volontaria era un importante mezzo di sopravvivenza, forse il più importante di tutti.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“Aveva perso le tracce di ciò che voleva, e poiché una persona è ciò che vuole, si poteva dire che avesse perso le tracce di se stesso.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections