Not long ago I was re-reading Jonathan Franzen’s famous Harper’s Essay as background to an essay I was working on, and towards the end Franzen quotes Don DeLillo, who had written to 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).
