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

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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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I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.
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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 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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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 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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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.
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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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Artists freeze themselves into these weird postures that are meant to be impressive and involving, then they fling them out into the world like Polaroids, and then they move on. And I'm stuck in this intense relationship to the Polaroid.
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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 try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
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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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You can't be deep without a surface
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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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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.
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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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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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I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
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Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
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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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