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It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.

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
False
Destinations
Series
Bluffs
Often
Consisted
Even
Arrival
Way
Arrivals
Life
Beginnings
Declarations
Declaration
Glimpsed
Destination
Bluff

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Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.
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Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.
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What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
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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.
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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.
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Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.
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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.
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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?
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My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
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When people call something original, 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.
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Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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?
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I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
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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.
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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.
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I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.
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