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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.

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
Life
Misuse
Teenage
Adult
Possibly
Receive
Adults

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
Jonathan Lethem
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I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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All paths lead nowhere choose one with heart...
Jonathan Lethem
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Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.
Jonathan Lethem
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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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I'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.
Jonathan Lethem
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There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem