I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented. — 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
In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love. — 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
Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible… — 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
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
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 plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your… — 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
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
My writing life is pretty simple - I try to work every day, almost always in the mornings - and I can… — 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
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
I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
The level at which my OCD enters my writing process isn't that I slap the keyboard - it's more along the lines… — 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
“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
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
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 tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams,… — 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
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
