For most of my life, I didn't pay attention to birds. Jonathan Franzen More Quotes by Jonathan Franzen More Quotes From Jonathan Franzen 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 The writer’s life is a life of revisions. Jonathan Franzen revision life-is Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it. Jonathan Franzen gold beautiful fiction How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one. Jonathan Franzen understanding real order [T]o love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self. Jonathan Franzen struggle self love I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear. Jonathan Franzen want bird thinking The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning. Jonathan Franzen space satisfaction world Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest. Jonathan Franzen survival-skills skills ignorance When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well. Jonathan Franzen struggle writing mean Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know. Jonathan Franzen talent world thinking I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists. Jonathan Franzen environmentalist armchairs feels An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970. Jonathan Franzen quaint ink bottles As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again. Jonathan Franzen form example easy Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage. Jonathan Franzen cameras serious heart I think we live in an era of problems that, if you step back and look at them globally, can't be solved. One response to that is, "Oh well, it's all hopeless. The natural world is getting wrecked, birds are disappearing, the planet is warming and so anything we might do on a smaller scale is meaningless." Jonathan Franzen bird looks thinking Even in an intensely mediated world, in a world that offers at least the illusion of radical self-invention and radical freedom of choice, I as a novelist am drawn to the things you can't get away from. Because much of the promise of radical self-invention, of defining yourself through this marvelous freedom of choice, it's just a lie. It's a lie that we all buy into, because it helps the economy run. Jonathan Franzen self running lying Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are. Jonathan Franzen sibling tattoo children I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging. Jonathan Franzen unchanging come-up book I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media. Jonathan Franzen media stories thinking Certain kinds of things that the novel used to do, which was, "Oh, I'm living out here in West Nowhere, Nebraska and I'm curious how the upper class in New York City lives, I guess I'll read a novel about it." We don't have to do that now. You just turn on the TV. Turn on Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. You can get that information anywhere. Novels don't have to do that anymore. Jonathan Franzen cities new-york class
