Top 149 Quotes & Sayings by Jonathan Lethem
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Jonathan Lethem.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.
I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.
I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow, I keep myself sane.
In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.
I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.
I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.
It was good while it was good.
Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.
I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.
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.
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.
I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.
It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.
I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
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.
Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.
I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.
The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.
I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.
I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
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.
Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature and my love of film.
I'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again. The energy comes from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there.
I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.
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.
My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.
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.
Good films demand to be looked at several times in order to be observed completely.
Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
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.
My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.
I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.
I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.
Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.
There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.
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.
Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.
What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos.
Music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can't really make it. It's like a car I can't drive.
When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.
So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.
You can't be deep without a surface
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.
Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.
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.
I never have been a musician; I'm not actually capable. Because I can't even pretend to acquire the gift, all of my first feelings about art are still attached to music. I look at it yearningly, I look at it wonderingly. I behold it from afar, as something unattainable, something outside of myself, from which I can take nourishment, but I can't domesticate and master.
Life is fundamentally up for grabs
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.
Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.
what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel - something that I could never have written myself - I'm still looking at it a little bit like a technician.
I try to write every day. I don't beat myself up about word counts, or how many hours are ticking by on the clock before I'm allowed to go and do something else. I just try to keep a hand in and work every single day, even if there are other demands or I'm on a book tour or have the flu or something, because then I keep my unconscious engaged with the book. Then I'm always a little bit writing, no matter what else I'm doing.
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.
There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.
I've always been passionately in love with movies, to such a degree that even as a young person of about nineteen or twenty I thought maybe I would try to become a film director. The reason I didn't do it was because I felt I didn't have the right personality. At that time in my life, I was mortally shy.
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