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I don't think I could live with someone that I didn't have an intellectual friendship with.
— Jonathan Franzen
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JF
Jonathan Franzen
novelist, writer, essayist, opinion journalist
1959
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
All Quotes by Jonathan Franzen
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One of the consolations of dying... Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically.
— Jonathan Franzen
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Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.
— Jonathan Franzen
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An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.
— Jonathan Franzen
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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
— Jonathan Franzen
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A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying.
— Jonathan Franzen
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In the years when he'd worked full-time, he'd never complained about frozen or takeout or preprepared dinners. To Caroline it probably seemed that he was changing the rules on her. But to Gary it seemed that the nature of family life itself was changing - that togetherness and filiality and fraternity weren't valued the way they were when he was young.
— Jonathan Franzen
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The taste of self-inflicted suffering, of an evening trashed in spite, brought curious satisfactions. Other people stopped being real enough to carry blame for how you felt. Only you and your refusal remained. And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled - the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor - refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired.
— Jonathan Franzen
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'It's who I am. Put somebody else's comfort ahead of my own? Go hop in a toilet to spare somebody else's feelings? That's the kinda thing you do, fella. You got everything bass ackwards. And look where it's landed you.' 'You oughtta have less. Me personally, I am opposed to all strictures. If you feel it, let it rip. If you want it, go for it. Dude's gotta put his own interests first.'
— Jonathan Franzen