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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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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
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Novels
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Novel
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Books
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Tended
More quotes by Jonathan Lethem
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
I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.
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
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'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
Jonathan Lethem
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
You can't be deep without a surface
Jonathan Lethem
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
It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.
Jonathan Lethem
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
My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
Jonathan Lethem
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
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
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
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
Jonathan Lethem
I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.
Jonathan Lethem
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.
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
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
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
