Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure.
Jonathan FranzenExpecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed societyโto help solve our contemporary problemsโseems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?
Jonathan FranzenFor every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.
Jonathan FranzenI was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
Jonathan FranzenReading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantiveโ my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
Jonathan Franzen