"I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them."
— Jonathan Franzen (Strong Motion)

"Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it."
— Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone: Essays)

"Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.”
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.) "
— Jonathan Franzen

"For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance."" "
— Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone)

"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

"I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her."
— Jonathan Franzen (The Discomfort Zone)

"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 (How to Be Alone: Essays)

"The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again."
— Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone)

"It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break."
— Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone: Essays)

"Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan. "
— Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)

"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 (The Corrections)

"The guiding principle of Martin’s personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those years he’d sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference."
— Jonathan Franzen (The Twenty-Seventh City: A Novel)

"Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earner, however, and she kissed him in the elevator. Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to."
— Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)

"It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this."
— Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)

"I had a nightmare about the Averys’ sweet-tempered German shepherd, Ina. In the dream, as I was sitting on the floor in the Averys’ living room, the dog walked up to me and began to insult me. She said I was a frivolous, cynical, attention-seeking “fag” whose entire life had been phony. I answered her frivolously and cynically and chucked her under the chin. She grinned at me with malice, as if to make clear that she understood me to the core. Then she sank her teeth into my arm. As I fell over backward, she went for my throat."
— Jonathan Franzen (The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History)

"What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive."
— Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)

"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 (The Corrections)

"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 (The Corrections)

"I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder."
— Jonathan Franzen (The Discomfort Zone)

""She wondered: How could people respond to these images if images didn't secretly enjoy the same status as real things? Not that images were so powerful, but that the world was so weak. It could be read, certainly, in its weakness, as on days when the sun baked fallen apples in orchards and the valley smelled like cider, and cold nights when Jordan had driven Chadds Ford for dinner and the tires of her Chevrolet had crunched on the gravel driveway; but the world was fungible only as images. Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.""
— Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)

"Indeed, the most reliable indicator of a tragic perspective in a work of fiction is comedy."
— Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone: Essays)