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. — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I definitely care about how the concept of New York punk was constructed, and why it mattered. But I wasn't gonna do that. Partly because I'm not a great journalist... — 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
