"Jonathan Franzen"の名言

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

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.

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.

It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.

Încep să cred că paradisul nu e o mulțumire veșnică. Ci ma degrabă o stare de mulțumire care face totul să pară veșnic. Nu există viață veșnică pentru că n-o să câștigi niciodată cursa cu timpul, totuși, dacă ești mulțumit, poți scăpa de timp, pentru că ajunge să nu mai conteze.

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.

You're either reading a book or you're not.

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.

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.

I think cultures of conformity produce vast quantities of shame, both in people who simply can't conform and people who do conform, but underneath, they're not feeling conformist.

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.

It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.

I'm not fussy about my food.

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

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.

The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.

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.

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.