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

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
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I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.
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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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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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I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.
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I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
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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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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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The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.
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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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You can't be deep without a surface
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My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
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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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There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.
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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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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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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 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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All paths lead nowhere choose one with heart...
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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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