Jonathan Lethem Quotes

76 quotes in 1175 categories

• When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still…
• How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few…
• It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.
• Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.
• I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
• It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards.…
• Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.
• Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as…
• The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism,
• All paths lead nowhere, choose one with heart,
• The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time *isn't*.
• The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents…
• Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.
• The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept…
• The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of…
• The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I…
• What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has…
• I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.
• Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.
• You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words…

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