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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.

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
Belief
Arts
Values
Diversity
Religion
Ideals
Art
Parents
Movement
Virtue
Worshipped
Parent
Overwhelming
Rights
Civil

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Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
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Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.
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I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
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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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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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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'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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My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
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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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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 have no one to blame for the construction for myself, of course, but I'm always surprised and slightly sulky when I realizeВ people are buying the whole thing.
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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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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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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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One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.
Jonathan Lethem
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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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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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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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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 don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.
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