Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit. — 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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
“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 hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems. — 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
“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 don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously. — 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 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
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 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
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
