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'm not planning what I listen to, except when I think the music can guide me to some emotional place I want… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I… — 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
Apologies aren't something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive… — 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
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
So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm… — Jonathan Lethem Copy Share Image
Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like.… — 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
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
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
