Jonathan Lethem Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

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

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

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

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.

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

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

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.

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

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

I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature, and my love of film...

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.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism.

All paths lead nowhere; choose one with heart...

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

To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.

There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.

My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.

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

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.

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.

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

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.

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

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

I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.

I'm gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts . . . I [like to] create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I alone know the flawed homely process along the way.

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.

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

You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

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

I suppose in a way most of my characters are non-consumers, not terribly interested in all the little baubles and artifacts of contemporary life.