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

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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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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Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
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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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Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.
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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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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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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.
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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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Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.
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It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.
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I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
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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.
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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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Some people have things written all over their faces the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.
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My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.
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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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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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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 can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
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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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