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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 with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging in culture?

The big, obvious reason that the social novel has become so scarce is that modern technologies do a better job of social instruction.

The writer of average talent who wants to report on, say, the plight of illegal aliens would be foolish to choose the novel as a vehicle. Ditto the writer who wants to offend prevailing sensitivities.

Solitary work--the work of writing, the work of reading--is the essence of fiction.

Technological consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine...

The real problem is that the average man or woman's entire life is increasingly structured to avoid precisely the kinds of conflicts on which fiction, preoccupied with manners, has always tried.
[...] Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the centre of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them. If we see religion and art as the historically preferred methods of coming to terms with this Ache, then what happens to art when our technological and economic systems and even out commercialised religions become sufficiently sophisticated to make each of us the centre of our own universe of choices and gratifications?

I used to distrust creative-writing departments for what seemed to me their artificial safety, just as I distrusted book clubs for treating literature like a cruciferous vegetable that could be choked down only with a spoonful of socialising.

As the social stigma of depression disappears, the aesthetic stigma increases. It's not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. It's the sense that we live in a reductively binary culture: you're either healthy of you're sick, you either function or you don't.

A novelist has a responsibility to stay close to life in the mainstream, to walk the streets, rub shoulders with the teeming masses, etc.--the better to be able, in Sven Birkersts's words, to bring readers "meaningful news about what it means to live in the world of the present."

Jonathan Franzen, 'Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels'

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