Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I don't know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I try to write every day. I don't beat myself up about word counts, or how many hours are ticking by on… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
“The thing about this bookshelf is that each of these books is a vast experience unto itself, while also being both self-contained… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
“Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
“Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books.… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
“Just handling this ocean of different books—new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten—it was literature as this giant… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment.… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
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… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share
I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share
“I suppose there was never a reason for tearing down a cabin or scrapping a stopped automobile, if you had all those acres.” — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share
My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share
It's impossible to overstate how my relationship to music forms a preserve for the esoteric or even spiritual aspect of my relationship to cultural… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share
“If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share
I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share
“Mingus Rude, Arthur Lomb, Gabriel Stern and Tim Vandertooth, even Aaron K. Doily: Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share
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… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share
“Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car.” — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share
“The stumbling block will turn out to be the traditional one for students of consciousness: the flashlight is incapable of shining on itself, so… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share
