Jonathan Franzen Quotes

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

My first, 'Room on the Roof,' was the longest book I've written.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

I don't have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

What one's goal should be is just to become a better writer and to tell different kinds of stories.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.

For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda.

If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.

Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.

My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.

'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.

My first novel, 'John Crow's Devil,' freed me up to write about the past, and 'The Book of Night Women' freed me up to have a book totally based on voice and being very spontaneous.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.

I write my books never thinking of an actor.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.