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I definitely care about how the concept of New York punk was constructed, and why it mattered. But I wasn't gonna do that. Partly because I'm not a great journalist...

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
Concept
Concepts
Definitely
Gonna
Mattered
York
Constructed
Wasn
Partly
Care
Punk
Great
Journalist

More quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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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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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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Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.
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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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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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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.
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Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
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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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What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
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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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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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Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.
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I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
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However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.
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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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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
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My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
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All paths lead nowhere choose one with heart...
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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 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