Jonathan Franzen Quotes

I am so sorry to see the state of reading in such decline. I think it says something really scary and terrible about us as a culture. I think it does have to do with everyone's total global embrace of technology.

Computers don't kill books; people do.

Before there was an Internet, before there was an A.O.L., the circulation of newspapers was going down.

The age of the book is almost gone.

It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don't read anymore.

There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology... the new way of killing time.

When I was a boy, there were three influences on children. The school, the family, and the church. Now there is a fourth---television.

I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.

Books are up against TV and movies and video games and a multimedia society that is so busy that people don't have contemplative time any more. I worry deeply about this. In fact, I worry about everything all the time. I used to be a punk. All I wanted to do was tear everything down, and that was so much easier.

Man no longer dreams over a book in which a soft voice, a constant companion, observes, exhorts, or sighs with him through the pangs of youth and age. Today he is more likely to sit before a screen and dream the mass dream which comes from outside.

The printed page seems to have come to something of a dead end for all of us.

Now your kids can't escape. Thirteen-year-olds back then, if they didn't watch the evening news, they didn't see news. If they didn't watch the 6:30 or seven p.m. news, they didn't see news. Today younger people have much more access to that kind of hard news than you did when you were 13 back then.

Wherever you turn you cannot live without internet, phones .. So I think the film industry will change, but I still believe that the TV will survive in the same way the cinema survives.

So much of the world is digital.

Humanity is always made up of more dead than living.

Times before you, when even the living men were Antiquities; when the living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world, could not be properly said, to go unto the greater number.

I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren't consumed by technology and television. My mother insisted that her children read. To describe my scarce leisure time in today's terms, I always default to reading.

I hate the modern day the kids live in. I don't think it's very cool. Everyone's interconnected.

The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

We often hear that the digital age has resulted in a devaluing of time, space, and place. But I wonder if theseclaims are exaggerated.

Life and death are different sides of the same coin.

If millions are born millions must die.

When death comes, it's just like winter. We don't say, "There ought not to be winter." That the winter season, when the leaves fall and the snow comes, is some kind of defeat, something which we should hold out against. No. Winter is part of the natural course of events. No winter, no summer. No cold, no heat.