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.
It is the duty of the State to educate, and the right of the people to demand education.
In teaching, the other main problem related to type is the students’ interest. Intuitives and sensing types differ greatly in what they find interesting in any subject even if they like, that is, are interested in, the same subjects. Intuitives like the principle, the theory, the why. Sensing types like the practical application, the what and the how.
Part of my job as Children's Laureate is to visit schools and talk about my love of books and stories and encourage them all to do it as well - to read, to write, to never be afraid of their own voice. Because we all have something to say.
Public intellectuals are often put in the position of having their words, no matter how off-the-cuff, treated as doctrine.
The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.
Music has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young.
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