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

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.
Jonathan Lethem
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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 hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
Jonathan Lethem
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Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.
Jonathan Lethem
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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
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Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.
Jonathan Lethem
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I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
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.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.
Jonathan Lethem
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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