Quote: Don DeLillo on Writing as Freedom

I’m re-reading Jonathan Franzen’s famous Harper’s Essay as background to a piece I’m working on for The Quarterly Conversation, and towards the end Franzen quotes Don DeLillo, who had written him:

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

This quote is drawn from the revised version of the essay published in How to Be Alone (2002) and not as originally published in Harper’s six years earlier (linked above).

Fun fact: for the first time since purchasing that book in 2004, I took a close look at the cover and realized that in the meantime, I had been in that very bookstore. I could swear that it was a bookstore in the West Village that I killed some time in once, in the fall of 2006. The varnished wooden floor and the display tables at the center all seemed familiar, and I seemed to have a memory of lingering at the old heavy table in the background, with the two lights hanging above, to browse through a book I didn’t end up buying.

So I turned the paperback over and sure enough, the photo is credited to one Greg Martin, “taken at the bookstore Three Lives and Company in New York City.” That’s the one, all right! I have a photo in my photo album to prove it.

A day later on that same trip, I bought a new hardcover copy of The Discomfort Zone — which I still haven’t read — at the Strand.

posted: 09 March 27
under: Open Folio