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

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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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?
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I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.
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What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
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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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When people call something original, 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.
Jonathan Lethem
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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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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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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 hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
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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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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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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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Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
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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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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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The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.
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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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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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There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.
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