For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.
Interpretation
This quote signifies the transition from reading to viewing as dominant forms of media consumption.
Jonathan Franzen suggests that there is a significant shift happening in society, where traditional reading is declining as more people turn to visual media. This change marks a pivotal moment in how stories and information are consumed, indicating a potential cultural transformation and a reevaluation of the importance of reading in our lives.
In practice
In a speech about the future of literature, one could quote Franzen to discuss the rising influence of visual media.
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.
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.
Each 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.
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.
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.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
Eradicate poverty. This is all that matters in my country. When I am out training I think about this a lot; when I am running it is going over in my mind. As a country we cannot move forward until we eradicate poverty.
We must become the change we want to see.
If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play.
And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands.
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.
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