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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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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
Coming
Words
Sense
Body
Writing
Mind
Always
Physical

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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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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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 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.
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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.
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Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.
Jonathan Lethem
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I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
Jonathan Lethem
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The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.
Jonathan Lethem
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One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.
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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However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.
Jonathan Lethem
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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?
Jonathan Lethem
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What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
Jonathan Lethem
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Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.
Jonathan Lethem
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How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?
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
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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.
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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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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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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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