Jonathan Franzen People Quotations

If you look at the New Testament, it's a gospel of love. Yes, there's talk of judgement and there's talk of heaven and there's talk of people not getting into heaven, but it doesn't seem to me that the fundamental message of the gospels was one of guilt and retribution so much as love.

I'd be surprised if non-fiction writers hate to be interviewed. We all hate them, because there's really nothing to say except "Read the book." Right? At least with non-fiction, you can kind of convey some information, and people can decide for themselves whether they want more of that kind of information. But with a novel, what am I going to do?

It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

Deploring other people--their lack of perfection--had always been our sport.

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.

If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.

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.

Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.