Quote

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

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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
Humans
Passed
Imposed
Every
Male
Tale
Really
Tales
Forest
Love
Discovered
Alike
World
Males
Existed
Female
Marry
Mattered
Someone
Fairy
Lens
Human
Forests
Lenses

More quotes by 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.
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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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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
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
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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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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'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
Jonathan Lethem
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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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All paths lead nowhere choose one with heart...
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
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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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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Reading and writing are the same thing it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.
Jonathan Lethem
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I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.
Jonathan Lethem
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What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
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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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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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
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Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
Jonathan Lethem