Jonathan Franzen Reading Quotations

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.

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.

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

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

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.