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 →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.
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
Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.
Leonardo Da VinciRead
Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music
Charles BaudelaireRead
She's got those big black eyes with plenty shiny white in them that makes them shine like brand new money and she knows what God gave women eyelashes for, too. Her hair is not what you might call straight. It's negro hair, but it's got a kind of white flavor. Like the piece of string out of a ham. It's not ham at all, but it's been around ham and got the flavor.
Zora Neale HurstonRead
Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul - the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.
Langston HughesRead
I think that cinema and the arts are central in our lives because we grow up and learn about the world through our exposure to stories. Parents use them as a tool to teach their children fundamental truths and values, much as adults can view them to gain exposure to cultures and individuals that they'd never be able to view in their own lives.
Forest WhitakerRead
There's a film you write, there's a film you shoot, and there's a film that you cut - and they're all different.
Paul GreengrassRead