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I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy.

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
Book
Seem
Simply
Crazy
Talk
Idiotically
Another
Recently
Seems
Noticed
Character
Allowed
Find
Excuse

More quotes by 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.
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There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.
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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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Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.
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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 don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.
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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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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.
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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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My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
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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 try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
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I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.
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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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I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
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Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.
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What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
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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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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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