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

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I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
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I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
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The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.
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I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy.
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Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.
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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.
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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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There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.
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Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.
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There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.
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My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
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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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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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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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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.
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You can't be deep without a surface
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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'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.
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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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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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