Jonathan Franzen Quotes

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

The disparity between what people said life was and what I knew it to be unnerved me at times, but I swore that nothing would ever make me say life should be anything.

Because the life that I live - the life that we all live - is filtered through [one's own] experience. It isn't necessarily optimistic when you look at the political phenomena, the different things that are going on in the world.

Life is whatever we conceive it to be.

You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life.

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had.

To me the ambiguity is, maybe our perception of ourselves is always going to be different than somebody else's perception. There will always be that disparity.

If the truth is told, things are just as bad as you yourself care to make them.

I've got to show life as I see it.

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality

I don't know why people see the things that they do. I wouldn't pay to see them, they don't touch me or move me in any way.

The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.

One person's crazy is another person's refreshing.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. But when you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that there is nothing that has unchanging self.

I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

Life is a b*tch depending how you dress her.

Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.

He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.

Is it you and I who are crazy, or is it everybody else?

It's the Point of Your View that Decides What You See - / One Man's Flop Is Another Man's Hit. / From Manners to Movies, the Picture Keeps Changing / Depending Upon Where You Sit.

A great work of art is one that truly moves and inspires you. You yourself must be moved. Don't look at art with others' eyes. Don't listen to music with others' ears. You must react to art with your own feelings, your own heart and mind.