For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance. Jonathan Franzen More Quotes by Jonathan Franzen More Quotes From Jonathan Franzen The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator. Jonathan Franzen spectators reader writing When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way. Jonathan Franzen weirdness people way And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book. Jonathan Franzen smart silence book But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny. Jonathan Franzen dave yeah thinking It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council. Jonathan Franzen realizing plot steps Popularity has become its own justification. Jonathan Franzen justification popularity The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis". Jonathan Franzen invention stories fiction What he'd never understood about men in his position, in all the books he'd read and movies he'd seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good. Jonathan Franzen credit men book Use well thy freedom. Jonathan Franzen wells use But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special. Jonathan Franzen humans special feelings This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of "I". I can't stop it. I'm writing this. Jonathan Franzen forgiving notebook writing He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking. Jonathan Franzen point-break wife pain Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews?" "Basically everything, except technical proficiency," Walter said. "Right." "But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. 'Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't live without my freedom, yeah yeah.' That's pretty much every song. Jonathan Franzen dave yeah song Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination. Jonathan Franzen data imagination needs It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds. Jonathan Franzen clock hours regret I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure. Jonathan Franzen believe fiction world [T]hat 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. Jonathan Franzen hats grace religious THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor. Jonathan Franzen keys hurt years Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose. Jonathan Franzen irritating If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation. Jonathan Franzen real spring book
