Jonathan Lethem Quotes

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.

The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

I 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.

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

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.

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

The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.

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

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

Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I met someone who lives in an elevator.

I'm not too embarrassed to say I'm the definition of the target audience. This is my generation, the one of exalting music in album form.

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

In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.

Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash.

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.

I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.

I'm not planning what I listen to, except when I think the music can guide me to some emotional place I want to be reminded of.

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.

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

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

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

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

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

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.

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.

What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

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.