Quote

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.

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
Memories
Autobiography
Spiritual
Fragments
Book
Trick
Kind
Tricks
Insane
Memory
Collage
Level
Collages
Levels
Openly

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Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.
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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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Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.
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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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It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.
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Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.
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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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With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.
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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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Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
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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'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
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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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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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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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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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I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
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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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What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
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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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