Jonathan Lethem Quotes

76 quotes in 1175 categories

• I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.
• However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be…
• Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.
• Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash.
• I met someone who lives in an elevator.
• For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity…
• You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male…
• There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.
• In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need…
• Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
• I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of…
• I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
• As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have…
• I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they…
• There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous,…
• What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
• You can't be deep without a surface
• Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break…
• what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
• Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to…

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