Quote

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.

Jonathan Lethem

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonathan Lethem
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: February 19
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Jonathan Allen Lethem
Harry Conklin
Embraced
Interior
Interiors
Parts
Move
Moving
Carl
Certain
World
Exterior

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

Image
Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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
Image
One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
I'm a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I had an all-Fear of Music iPod, just versions of the 11 songs from the record. No other songs allowed.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.
Jonathan Lethem