Top 200 Jonathan Franzen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”

— Jonathan Franzen

2. “Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.”

— Jonathan Franzen

3. “Use well thy freedom.”

— Jonathan Franzen

4. “You’re either reading a book or you’re not.”

— Jonathan Franzen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Jonathan Franzen

6. “I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.”

— Jonathan Franzen

7. “You see more sitting still than chasing after.”

— Jonathan Franzen

8. “Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.”

— Jonathan Franzen

9. “Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.”

— Jonathan Franzen

10. “The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”

— Jonathan Franzen

11. “There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness.”

— Jonathan Franzen

12. “The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.”

— Jonathan Franzen

13. “Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.”

— Jonathan Franzen

14. “How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.”

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Jonathan Franzen

16. “Once a killer, always a killer.”

— Jonathan Franzen

17. “Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.”

— Jonathan Franzen

18. “I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.”

— Jonathan Franzen

19. “Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.”

— Jonathan Franzen

20. “Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive’s sake.”

— Jonathan Franzen

21. “The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?”

— Jonathan Franzen

22. “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.”

— Jonathan Franzen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

23. “Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.”

— Jonathan Franzen

24. “Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there’s no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with it.”

— Jonathan Franzen

25. “Integrity’s a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They’re pure hyena.”

— Jonathan Franzen

26. “Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence – the drama of being her – was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.”

— Jonathan Franzen

27. “Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.”

— Jonathan Franzen

28. “And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.”

— Jonathan Franzen

29. “I’ve moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don’t want these particular species to disappear.”

— Jonathan Franzen

30. “He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others.”

— Jonathan Franzen

31. “The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.”

— Jonathan Franzen

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Jonathan Franzen

33. “It’s healthy to say uncle when your bone’s about to break.”

— Jonathan Franzen

34. “That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men. The men are all looking at pictures of women, and the women are all communicating with other women.”

— Jonathan Franzen

35. “The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away. You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die.”

— Jonathan Franzen

36. “Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.”

— Jonathan Franzen

37. “And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?”

— Jonathan Franzen

38. “THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.”

— Jonathan Franzen

39. “There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.”

— Jonathan Franzen

40. “The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.”

— Jonathan Franzen

41. “Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.”

— Jonathan Franzen

42. “But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.”

— Jonathan Franzen

43. “Popularity has become its own justification.”

— Jonathan Franzen

44. “A child who’s got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight,” she said. “If the parents are smart, they’ll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she’ll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them.”

— Jonathan Franzen

45. “The Berglunds were the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lack the courage of their privilege.”

— Jonathan Franzen

46. “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.”

— Jonathan Franzen

47. “Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.”

— Jonathan Franzen

48. “The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who’d ever truly listened to them.”

— Jonathan Franzen

49. “What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.”

— Jonathan Franzen

50. “But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.”

— Jonathan Franzen