I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems. — 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
“Behold the onset of my flinty tone. Along with so much else, a soft-tissue sarcoma can apparently drain the exultation from one's… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again.… — 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
What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That… — 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
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
Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that… — 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 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
“We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and Biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or… — 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
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
I've discovered that like every writer, I'm helpless MYSELF - and that means I find myself unconsciously or semi-consciously repeating motifs and… — 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
“We writers aren't sculpting in DNA, or even clay or mud, but words, sentences, paragraphs, syntax, voice; materials issued by tongue or… — 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
“But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
“This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences—nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever… — 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
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I'm gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts . . . I [like to] create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I… — 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
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… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode... I see the vernacular register of 20th century… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
“Picture us, five floating nudists in oxygen masks, ragged with fatigue and degrees of schock, squeezing the last beads of antifreeze from… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it. — 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 listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the… — 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 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
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
![“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.” quote by Jonathan Lethem](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/49d/jonathan-lethem-1403_flawed_i-m-gregarious-with-writers-and-never-wi_1322348.jpg)
