The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
Jonathan FranzenRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that true creativity requires solitude and deep thought, which contrasts with the overwhelming noise of online information.
Jonathan Franzen highlights the necessity for writers to retreat into quiet spaces where their creativity can flourish, as opposed to the distractions and superficiality found on the Internet. He argues that while the Internet is filled with vast amounts of data, it detracts from the imaginative process by saturating the mind with noise and limiting the potential for original thought, which is essential for good writing.
Themes
CreativityImaginationWritingSolitudeInternet
In practice
Example use cases
A writer giving a talk on the importance of focused work might use this quote to emphasize the need for solitude.
More from Jonathan Franzen
All quotes βEach new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
Jonathan FranzenRead
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
Jonathan FranzenRead
To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
Jonathan FranzenRead
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
Jonathan FranzenRead
If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person - a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people - I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.
Jonathan FranzenRead
Similar quotes
You have to go out there and give a piece of yourself -- your life, your soul. And you better give the audience everything you can -- physically, emotionally, musically. Then maybe they'll accept you and give you a standing ovation at the end.
Neil DiamondRead
I am uncompromising to the point of huge dissension in the studio. And it's served me very well. My theory and my philosophy is, 'Compromise breeds mediocrity.' Obviously, you have to pick your battles, and the more success an artist has, the more they want to be involved in their own career, which is not necessarily a good thing.
David FosterRead
I enjoy cooking with wine, sometimes I even put it in the food I'm cooking.
Julia ChildRead
Little Axe's records are wracked with collective grief. Spectral harmonicas resemble howling wolves; echoes linger like wounds that will never heal; the voices of the living harmonise with the voices of the dead in songs thick with reproach, recrimination and the hunger for redemption.
Mark FisherRead
I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.
Tom WaitsRead
And thus it came to pass that the Silmarils found their long homes: one in the airs of heaven, and one in the fires of the heart of the world, and one in the deep waters.
J. R. R. TolkienRead