Jonathan Lethem Quotes
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Memory, Past)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Work)
"In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Love, Swallows)
"It was good while it was good."
- Jonathan Lethem
"I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Books, Building, Luck, Result, Writers)
"It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Expectation, Now, Want, Will)
"My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Work, Fiction, Information, Obvious)
"Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Deep, Fans)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Religion, Belief, Values, Virtue, Civil rights, Diversity, Ideals, Parents)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Fiction)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Politics, Actor, Film)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Character, Talk)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Career, Writer)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Autobiography, Memory, Spiritual)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Father, Artist, Artists, Example, Friends, Parents, Writers)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: People, Artists, Battle, Civil rights, Class, Hippies, Middle class, Poor)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Love, Energy, Film, Literature, Nostalgia)
"Discomfort is very much part of my master plan."
- Jonathan Lethem
"Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: English, Writing)
"I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull."
- Jonathan Lethem
"I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Fiction)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Art)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Love, Absence, Energy, Writing, Yearning)
"I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Writer)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Time, Beginning, Direction, End)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Work)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Space, Writing)
"I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture."
- Jonathan Lethem
"I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Work, World)
"I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Order, Writing)