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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

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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.
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All paths lead nowhere choose one with heart...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
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The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.
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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.
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Some people have things written all over their faces the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.
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I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
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