Jonathan Lethem Quotes

76 quotes in 1175 categories

• I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
• It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
• I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
• Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature and my…
• I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a…
• I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his…
• As a child growing up in pre-gentrification Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, I went everywhere by bicycle. My bike was in many ways the key to my…
• Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.
• I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.
• Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.
• I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.
• I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a…
• I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.
• I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I…
• I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically…
• I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following…
• I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my…
• 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…
• I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't…
• Life is fundamentally up for grabs

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