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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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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
Everything
Need
Needs
Eliminating
Thing
Focus
Almost
Talk
Art
Order

More quotes by 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.
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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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My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
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Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.
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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.
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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.
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The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.
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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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Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
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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.
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Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
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I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.
Jonathan Lethem
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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 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.
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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.
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Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.
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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.
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There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.
Jonathan Lethem
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I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem