I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.
Jonathan LethemI'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.
Jonathan LethemThe 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 LethemI hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.
Jonathan LethemI'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