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Jonathan Lethem Inspirational Quotes (66)

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I'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 Lethem
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I'm a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.
Jonathan Lethem
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It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.
Jonathan Lethem
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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
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What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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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...
Jonathan Lethem
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You can't be deep without a surface
Jonathan Lethem
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My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.
Jonathan Lethem
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One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.
Jonathan Lethem
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I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.
Jonathan Lethem
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Reading and writing are the same thing it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.
Jonathan Lethem
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All paths lead nowhere choose one with heart...
Jonathan Lethem
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I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
Jonathan Lethem
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How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?
Jonathan Lethem
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I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
Jonathan Lethem
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I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.
Jonathan Lethem
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Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
Jonathan Lethem
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I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.
Jonathan Lethem
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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
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I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
Jonathan Lethem
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