Jonathan Franzen - Reader Quotes

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Think of the novel as lover: Let's stay home tonight and have a great time; just because you're touched where you want to be touched, it doesn't mean you're cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it. Or the novelist as cook who prepares, as a gift to the reader, this many-course meal. Not just ice cream, but broccoli rabe as well.

Jonathan Franzen

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

Jonathan Franzen

A novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience.

Jonathan Franzen

Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.

Jonathan Franzen

The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

Jonathan Franzen