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

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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.
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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.
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Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
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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 realizeĐ’ people are buying the whole thing.
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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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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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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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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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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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You can't be deep without a surface
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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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...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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I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
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Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.
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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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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 had an all-Fear of Music iPod, just versions of the 11 songs from the record. No other songs allowed.
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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.
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