Quote

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.

Jonathan Lethem

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Draw
Head
Shape
Book
Notes
Take
Hologram
Work
Mental
Holograms
Make
Draws
Diagrams
Never
Image
Charts
Shapes
Elaborate
Hold

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

Image
I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
When people call something original, 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
You can't be deep without a surface
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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...
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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
Image
Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
I believe that written stories will continue to survive because they answer an essential human need. I think movies might disappear before the novel disappears, because the novel is really one of the only places in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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
Image
You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem