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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.

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
Finished
Book
Pages
Looks
Objects
Real
Going
Hold
Immensely
Believe
Words
Bound
Good
Making
Bounds
Care
Object
Look

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
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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.
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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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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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Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.
Jonathan Lethem
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I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.
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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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I'm a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.
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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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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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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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The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory.
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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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The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.
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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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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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Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
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What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
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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 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.
Jonathan Lethem