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You can't be deep without a surface

Jonathan Lethem

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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
Surface
Deep
Without

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.
Jonathan Lethem
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You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.
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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Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
Jonathan Lethem
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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
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I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
Jonathan Lethem
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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
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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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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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I believe that written stories will continue to survive because they answer an essential human need. I think movies might disappear before the novel disappears, because the novel is really one of the only places in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
Jonathan Lethem
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I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.
Jonathan Lethem
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...Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter?
Jonathan Lethem
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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
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I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.
Jonathan Lethem
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I'm a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.
Jonathan Lethem
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However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.
Jonathan Lethem
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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
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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 listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem