Listen to me. Iโm shy. Iโm not stupid. I canโt meet peopleโs eyes. I donโt know if you understand what thatโs like. Thereโs a whole world going on around me, Iโm aware of that. Itโs not because I donโt want to look at you, Lucinda. Itโs that I donโt want to be seen.
Jonathan LethemI'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again... The energy comes from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there.
Jonathan LethemInsomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.
Jonathan Lethem