{"author":"Jonathan Franzen","author_id":"Jonathan+Franzen","total_quotes":62,"quotes":[{"text":"My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming.","author":"Jonathan Franzen","tags":["fiction","kafka","novel","writing"],"id":418,"author_id":"Jonathan+Franzen"},{"text":"Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.","author":"Jonathan Franzen","tags":["inspirational","writing-inspiration","writing-philosophy"],"id":7158,"author_id":"Jonathan+Franzen"},{"text":"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.","author":"Jonathan Franzen","tags":["addiction","david-foster-wallace","desperation","love","mental-illness","self-confidence","self-esteem","suicide","writing"],"id":14707,"author_id":"Jonathan+Franzen"},{"text":"There are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself.","author":"Jonathan Franzen","tags":["gossip"],"id":20492,"author_id":"Jonathan+Franzen"},{"text":"And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... That I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace.","author":"Jonathan Franzen","tags":["aloneness","books","literature","reading","words"],"id":33591,"author_id":"Jonathan+Franzen"},{"text":"The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.","author":"Jonathan Franzen","tags":["revolution"],"id":45398,"author_id":"Jonathan+Franzen"},{"text":"It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.","author":"Jonathan Franzen","tags":["regret","relationships"],"id":49664,"author_id":"Jonathan+Franzen"},{"text":"When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.","author":"Jonathan Franzen","tags":["action","book","character","franzen","jonathan-franzen","literature","novel","room","writing","writing-tips"],"id":50979,"author_id":"Jonathan+Franzen"},{"text":"The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through...Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly.","author":"Jonathan Franzen","tags":["literature","opening-lines","third-person"],"id":51020,"author_id":"Jonathan+Franzen"},{"text":"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.","author":"Jonathan Franzen","tags":["addiction","david-foster-wallace","love","mental-illness","suicide"],"id":53292,"author_id":"Jonathan+Franzen"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":62,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}