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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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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
Course
Slightly
Whole
Construction
Thing
Surprised
Always
Buying
People
Blame
Realize
Realizing
Courses
Sulky

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I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
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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.
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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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The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism.
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I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
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You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.
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I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
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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.
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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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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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By removing the stories from the morass of things that surround us, I'm hoping to achieve some kind of purer approach to emotional life.
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I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
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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 want what we all want, said Carl. To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.
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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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You can't be deep without a surface
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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...
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I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.
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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 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.
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