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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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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
Something
Correspond
Rhythms
Bodies
Rhythm
Language
Body
More quotes by Jonathan Lethem
When people call something original, 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.
Jonathan Lethem
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
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
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.
Jonathan Lethem
One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.
Jonathan Lethem
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
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.
Jonathan Lethem
What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
Jonathan Lethem
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
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
I had an all-Fear of Music iPod, just versions of the 11 songs from the record. No other songs allowed.
Jonathan Lethem
My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
Jonathan Lethem
It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.
Jonathan Lethem
Artists freeze themselves into these weird postures that are meant to be impressive and involving, then they fling them out into the world like Polaroids, and then they move on. And I'm stuck in this intense relationship to the Polaroid.
Jonathan Lethem
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
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
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
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
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
Jonathan Lethem
