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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.

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
Draw
Experience
Shape
Felt
Liked
Book
Draws
Always
Connected
Things
Shapes
People
Books
Attention
Wanting

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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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.
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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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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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I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.
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I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
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Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.
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My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
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With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.
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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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When people call something original, 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.
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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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The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.
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I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.
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What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
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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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Artists freeze themselves into these weird postures that are meant to be impressive and involving, then they fling them out into the world like Polaroids, and then they move on. And I'm stuck in this intense relationship to the Polaroid.
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You can't be deep without a surface
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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 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.
Jonathan Lethem
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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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