Jonathan Lethem Quotes

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The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.

Jonathan Lethem

Listen to me. Iโ€™m shy. Iโ€™m not stupid. I canโ€™t meet peopleโ€™s eyes. I donโ€™t know if you understand what thatโ€™s like. Thereโ€™s a whole world going on around me, Iโ€™m aware of that. Itโ€™s not because I donโ€™t want to look at you, Lucinda. Itโ€™s that I donโ€™t want to be seen.

Jonathan Lethem

I believe that written stories will continue to survive because they answer an essential human need. I think movies might disappear before the novel disappears, because the novel is really one of the only places in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

Jonathan Lethem

I definitely care about how the concept of New York punk was constructed, and why it mattered. But I wasn't gonna doร‚ that. Partly because I'm not a great journalist...

Jonathan Lethem

I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.

Jonathan Lethem

When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.

Jonathan Lethem

With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.

Jonathan Lethem

Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.

Jonathan Lethem

I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

Jonathan Lethem

The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

Jonathan Lethem

The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory.

Jonathan Lethem

I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.

Jonathan Lethem

Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.

Jonathan Lethem

Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.

Jonathan Lethem

My writing life is pretty simple - I try to work every day, almost always in the mornings - and I can only write fiction effectively for about three or at the most four hours. No big mysteries, I just sit down and try to advance the cause a little bit every day.

Jonathan Lethem

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

Jonathan Lethem

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

Jonathan Lethem

Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.

Jonathan Lethem

I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts.

Jonathan Lethem

I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.

Jonathan Lethem

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

Jonathan Lethem

What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.

Jonathan Lethem

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

Jonathan Lethem

My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.

Jonathan Lethem

Once you fall into habits, I think, you're dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you've done in the past.

Jonathan Lethem

I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.

Jonathan Lethem

Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.

Jonathan Lethem

I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy.

Jonathan Lethem

It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

Jonathan Lethem

I've discovered that like every writer, I'm helpless MYSELF - and that means I find myself unconsciously or semi-consciously repeating motifs and themes and even using certain words or images recurrently in my work, no matter how much I think I'm starting fresh. But I've always admired artists who made a specific sport of trying to visit different kinds of genres or mediums or modes - not just 'western' or 'detective', but comedy/tragedy, epic and miniature, traditional/experimental.

Jonathan Lethem

Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.

Jonathan Lethem

As much as I care about historical context - I'm very eager to read a really great historical account.

Jonathan Lethem

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

Jonathan Lethem

Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.

Jonathan Lethem

Every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It's impossible.

Jonathan Lethem

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

Jonathan Lethem

I have no one to blame for the construction for myself, of course, but I'm always surprised and slightly sulky when I realizeะ’ people are buying the whole thing.

Jonathan Lethem

I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over.

Jonathan Lethem

It's impossible to overstate how my relationship to music forms a preserve for the esoteric or even spiritual aspect of my relationship to cultural stuff, to human expressivity... it's a safe enclosure.

Jonathan Lethem

When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had.

Jonathan Lethem

I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.

Jonathan Lethem

The level at which my OCD enters my writing process isn't that I slap the keyboard - it's more along the lines of a compulsive need to swap syllables around, rework words and sentences - I revise for the pleasure and satisfaction of it, rather than out of a sense of duty.

Jonathan Lethem

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

Jonathan Lethem

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.

Jonathan Lethem

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

Jonathan Lethem

I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.

Jonathan Lethem

I'm a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.

Jonathan Lethem

Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and canโ€™t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.

Jonathan Lethem
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