Jonathan Lethem Quotes

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance for that you're in great trouble. If you want to call it a writer's block... that doesn't seem a very useful name for that kind of abiding that I think is the essence of the work.

I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow I keep myself sane.

The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.

I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.

For me, music is sort of the art that I can't incorporate into my person the way I want to.

The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like - or what some artist has decided the character really looks like - because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences.

Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

Apologies aren't something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror

By removing the stories from the morass of things that surround us, I'm hoping to achieve some kind of purer approach to emotional life.

No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.

It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.

So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode... I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure.

Music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can't really make it. It's like a car I can't drive.

...Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter?

I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.

I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

Good films demand to be looked at several times in order to be observed completely.

Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash.

I had an all-Fear of Music iPod, just versions of the 11 songs from the record. No other songs allowed.

You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.

Anyone could see it all coming and no one could possibly stop it and that was the beautiful thing. Friday night was open wide and writ in stone

Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.

I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.

The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.

Artists freeze themselves into these weird postures that are meant to be impressive and involving, then they fling them out into the world like Polaroids, and then they move on. And I'm stuck in this intense relationship to the Polaroid.

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.

Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.

I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.

Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information - facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.

I try to write every day. I don't beat myself up about word counts, or how many hours are ticking by on the clock before I'm allowed to go and do something else. I just try to keep a hand in and work every single day, even if there are other demands or I'm on a book tour or have the flu or something, because then I keep my unconscious engaged with the book. Then I'm always a little bit writing, no matter what else I'm doing.

Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.

As a child growing up in pre-gentrification Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, I went everywhere by bicycle. My bike was in many ways the key to my neighborhood, which, at the time, was Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This was in the 60s and 70s, before all the white people and restaurants. I really can't underscore boldly enough the fact that I grew up in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, before it was gentrified. You could get mugged!

I'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.

As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another.