Jonathan Franzen Quotes

One thing I think is that comics are really good at expressing emotion. I think there's a way that comics characters can be drawn not-realistically, but the emotional reality is still very sincere. So you can have these exaggerations that express inner emotion through physical appearance.

There's a lot of real estate in our brain dedicated to facial recognition and to physics. That takes a lot of processing power out of our brain.

Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.

When I look at someone's face, there's something in my brain that just clicks - that breaks down their face into the elements that go into a caricature. It might be like the way a chef tastes a dish and can break down into elements what went into it.

...everything looks worse in black and white.

Because your brain uses information from the areas around the blind spot to make a reasonable guess about what the blind spot would see if only it weren't blind, and then your brain fills in the scene with this information. That's right, it invents things, creates things, makes stuff up! It doesn't consult you about this, doesn't seek your approval. It just makes its best guess about the nature of the missing information and proceeds to fill in the scene.

The painter doesn't try to reproduce the scene before him... he simplifies and eliminates until he knows exactly what stirred him, sets this down in color and line as simply and as powerfully as possible and so translates his impression into an aesthetic emotion.

95 percent of economics is common sense made complicated, and even for the remaining 5 percent, the essential reasoning, if not all the technical details, can be explained in plain terms.

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

There's a technical reason why I think that frame rate is weird and it has to with your brain's ability to scan beyond a certain rate. The point is I find it looks weird.

I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Life is not a plot; it's in the details.

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.

Pointillism takes emotional images, character, etc., and makes them all come together and make a whole that tells a story.

If faces were not alike, we could not distinguish men from beasts; if they were not different, we could not tell one man from another.

There are chemists who spend their whole lives trying to find out what's in a lump of sugar. I want to know one thing. What is color?

There is a loving way with words and an unloving way. And it is only with the loving way that the simplicity of language becomes beautiful.

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Human faces are such a world!

The most essential point is lowliness.

It's essential to tailor rehab to what impassions someone. The brain gradually learns by riveting its attention-through endless repetitions.

As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit.

The learning is the heavy lifting. You need to get the words into your brain.