Lev Grossman: "It seemed to me..."

"'It seemed to me that if we were going to be elevating freedom to the defining principle of what we're about as a culture and a nation, we ought to take a careful look at what freedom in practice brings.' The weird thing about the freedom of Freedom is that what it doesn't bring is happiness..."

—Lev Grossman, from Jonathan Franzen. The Wide Shot, Time Magazine

Lev Grossman: "One of the ways..."

"One of the ways of surrendering freedom is to actually have convictions and a way of further surrendering freedom is to spend quite a bit of time acting on those convictions... There is something beyond freedom that people need: work, love, belief in something, commitment to something. Freedom is not enough. It's necessary, but not sufficient. It's what you do with freedom—what you give it up for—that matters."

—Lev Grossman, from Jonathan Franzen. The Wide Shot, Time Magazine

Lev Grossman: "There were a couple..."

"There were a couple of years when I could enjoy blowing off a workday and going bird-watching, followed by some years in which I came to realize that because my purpose on earth seems to be to write novels, I am actually freer when I'm chained to a project: freer from guilt anxiety, boredom, anger, purposelessness."

—Lev Grossman, from Jonathan Franzen. The Wide Shot, Time Magazine