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.
Interpretation
Understanding love requires direct experience with diverse individuals.
Jonathan Franzen's quote suggests that to write authentically about another's experiences and emotions, especially those of individuals from different backgrounds or belief systems, one must first engage deeply and personally with such people. This firsthand experience forms a crucial foundation for empathy and understanding that enriches the complexity of character representation in writing.
In practice
This quote would be a perfect inclusion in a speech about the importance of diverse experiences in literature.
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.
We're more than friends and neighbors and allies; we are kin, who together have built the most productive relationship between any two countries in the world today.
If they only married when they fell in love, most people would die unwed.
Every person that comes into our life comes for a reason; some come to learn and others come to teach.
I'm all for any place, any way, any media that can help people connect with somebody and not be lonely.
People have to start talking to know more about other cultures and to understand each other.
I shall remember the look in Margot's eyes all my life.
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