391 Quotes by Jonathan Franzen

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again.

Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.

she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

It'sthe fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.

The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.

Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance