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.
Interpretation
Reading books profoundly influences our lives by providing new experiences.
In this quote, Jonathan Franzen emphasizes the transformative power of reading, suggesting that each book we encounter contributes to our personal growth and life experiences. He reflects on how, from a young age, literature shaped his understanding of the world and himself, exemplified by his early encounter with a biography that inspired him significantly.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literacy, one might quote Franzen to illustrate how reading can positively impact life experiences.
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.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
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.
I tell my students to try to know molecules, so well that when they have some question involving molecules, they can ask themselves, What would I do if I were that molecule?
What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone
Never begrudge the money you spend on your own education.
The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.
What's wrong with our children? Adults telling children to be honest while lying and cheating. Adults telling children to not be violent while marketing and glorifying violence... I believe that adult hypocrisy is the biggest problem children face in America.
If my books can help children become readers then I feel I have accomplished something important.
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