Jonathan Franzen

“... It happened very fast. And now that he's dead he can't remember pain. It's as if he'd never existed.'He wanted her to believe this, but he wasn't sure he believed it himself. If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it.”

“I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.”

“I'm a poor person who has money.”

“I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.”

“I hate the word 'partner' so much.”

“Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.”

“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.”

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

“We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it, could see that David was wrong not to believe in his lovability and could imagine the pain of not believing in it. How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult--what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be--if you are not! And yet ... the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind. Even though David laughed at my much milder addictions and liked to tell me that I couldn't even conceive of how moderate I was, I can still extrapolate from these addictions, and from the secretiveness and solipsism and radical isolation and raw animal craving that accompany them, to the extremity of his. I can imagine the sick mental pathways by which suicide comes to seem like the one consciousness-quenching substance that nobody can take away from you.”

“The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.”

“I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.”

“[H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.]”

“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'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you're contented, because then time doesn't matter.”

“There used to be rather serious firewalls between the artist and the buying public - the gallery, the publisher. And technology demolishes that wall and basically says, 'Self-promote or die.' And that is a bad head for any sort of artist to be forced into.”

“I think the iPod is the true face of Republican politics, and I’m in favor of the music industry … standing up proud and saying it out loud: We in the Chiclet-manufacturing business are not about social justice, …we’re not about a coherent set of national ideals, we’re not about wisdom. We’re about choosing what WE want to listen to and ignoring everything else…. We’re about giving ourselves a mindless feel-good treat every five minutes. …We’re about persuading ten-year-old children to spend twenty-five dollars on a cool little silicone iPod case that costs a licensed Apple Computer subsidiary thirty-nine cents to manufacture.”

“Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.”

“And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.”

“I had a brief period of questioning whether I should perhaps adopt a child. And my New Yorker editor, Henry Finder, was horrified by the notion.”

“I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.”