Quote

I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.

Jonathan Lethem

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Prefer
Drinking
Wine
Ready
Books
Find
Book
Dislike
Like
Relevant

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
I'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
When people call something original, 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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
Image
I'm a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem
Image
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.
Jonathan Lethem