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I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.

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
Writing
Essential
Essentials
Sake
Interest
Making
Paragraphs
Doesn
Paragraph
Beautiful
Indulge
Everything
Luxury

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.
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Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
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I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.
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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.
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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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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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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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I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
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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.
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Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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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I had an all-Fear of Music iPod, just versions of the 11 songs from the record. No other songs allowed.
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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.
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I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
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Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.
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All paths lead nowhere choose one with heart...
Jonathan Lethem
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What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
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