Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
For me, music is sort of the art that I can't incorporate into my person the way I want to. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It's impossible. — 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
My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
“...Paranoid art, unlike paranoid persons, also distrusts itself. And so, paranoid art is the ultimate opposite, the urgent opposite, of complacent art.” — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Artists freeze themselves into these weird postures that are meant to be impressive and involving, then they fling them out into the… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I… — 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 never have been a musician; I'm not actually capable. Because I can't even pretend to acquire the gift, all of my… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues,… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Once you fall into habits, I think, you're dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives… — 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
“By trying to export myself into a place that didn't fully exist I asked works of art to bear my expectation that… — 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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 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
“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 Image
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 Image
