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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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Jonathan Lethem
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: February 19
Author
Essayist
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Science Fiction Writer
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New York City
New York
Jonathan Allen Lethem
Harry Conklin
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More quotes by 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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...Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter?
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
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.
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.
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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All paths lead nowhere choose one with heart...
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.
Jonathan Lethem
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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.
Jonathan Lethem
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The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.
Jonathan Lethem
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What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
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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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
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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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One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.
Jonathan Lethem
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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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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 a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.
Jonathan Lethem