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

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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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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.
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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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Reading and writing are the same thing it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.
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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...
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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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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.
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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.
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I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.
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I want what we all want, said Carl. To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.
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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.
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I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
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Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.
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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.
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Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
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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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I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
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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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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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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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