Quotes by Jonathan Lethem - Page 3 | QuoteForever

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I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Art
Listening
Writing
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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 lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Dark
Light
Sea
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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 John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Black And White
Giants
Watches
Wayne
Ford
Giant
John
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When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode... I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Century
Song
Writing
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I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Beautiful
Luxury
Writing
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No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Matter
May
Reading
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Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Attention
Book
People
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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 from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Absence
Excluded
Yearning
Love Energy New
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What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Communication
Language
Writing
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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 from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
New York
Energy
Writing
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When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Character
Crazy
Rolling
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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, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Kids
Halloween
Light
Sky
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Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain---same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Answers
Brain
World
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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 stuff, to human expressivity... it's a safe enclosure.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Safe
Spiritual
Stuff
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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 my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Book
Breakthrough
Good Luck
Luck
Odd
Way
Allowed
Writers
Gradually
Slowly
Result
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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. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Teacher
Children
Stress
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Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information - facts, more than just the surfaces of things.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Musical
People
Reading
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Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Believe
Book
Real
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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 unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Character
Duration
Stories
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I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Art
Book
Reading
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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 alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Female
Lenses
Males
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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 here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Brooklyn
Manhattan
Self
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Artists freeze themselves into these weird postures that are meant to be impressive and involving, then they fling them out into the world like Polaroids, and then they move on. And I'm stuck in this intense relationship to the Polaroid.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Artist
Moving
World
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So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Effort
Want
Writing
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As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel - something that I could never have written myself - I'm still looking at it a little bit like a technician.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Esoteric
Littles
Writing
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...Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter?
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Home
Alternatives
Doe
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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 that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Dating
Deployment
Icons
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My writing life is pretty simple - I try to work every day, almost always in the mornings - and I can only write fiction effectively for about three or at the most four hours. No big mysteries, I just sit down and try to advance the cause a little bit every day.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Morning
Simple
Writing
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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. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Eye
People
Stupid
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My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Heart
Mad
Reality
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I'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Interesting
People
Philosophical
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The level at which my OCD enters my writing process isn't that I slap the keyboard - it's more along the lines of a compulsive need to swap syllables around, rework words and sentences - I revise for the pleasure and satisfaction of it, rather than out of a sense of duty.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Ocd
Pleasure
Writing
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I don't know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about their work. It's something I find very difficult. And yet, one does have some sense of responsibility towards one's publishers, to the people trying to sell the book.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Book
People
Responsibility
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A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Choices
Dog
Photography
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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 afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Sky
Summer
Thinking
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I believe that written stories will continue to survive because they answer an essential human need. I think movies might disappear before the novel disappears, because the novel is really one of the only places in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Believe
Thinking
Two
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I've always been passionately in love with movies, to such a degree that even as a young person of about nineteen or twenty I thought maybe I would try to become a film director. The reason I didn't do it was because I felt I didn't have the right personality. At that time in my life, I was mortally shy.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Personality
Trying
Twenties
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Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance for that you're in great trouble. If you want to call it a writer's block... that doesn't seem a very useful name for that kind of abiding that I think is the essence of the work.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Block
Essence
Thinking
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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 every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Children
Judging
Mean
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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 bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Fire
Thinking
Unique
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I never have been a musician; I'm not actually capable. Because I can't even pretend to acquire the gift, all of my first feelings about art are still attached to music. I look at it yearningly, I look at it wonderingly. I behold it from afar, as something unattainable, something outside of myself, from which I can take nourishment, but I can't domesticate and master.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Art
Feelings
Musician
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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 neighborhood, which, at the time, was Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This was in the 60s and 70s, before all the white people and restaurants. I really can't underscore boldly enough the fact that I grew up in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, before it was gentrified. You could get mugged!
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Children
Growing Up
White
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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 before I'm allowed to go and do something else. I just try to keep a hand in and work every single day, even if there are other demands or I'm on a book tour or have the flu or something, because then I keep my unconscious engaged with the book. Then I'm always a little bit writing, no matter what else I'm doing.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Book
Hands
Writing
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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 join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Believe
Insomnia
Race
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Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Artist
Heart
Reading
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I've discovered that like every writer, I'm helpless MYSELF - and that means I find myself unconsciously or semi-consciously repeating motifs and themes and even using certain words or images recurrently in my work, no matter how much I think I'm starting fresh. But I've always admired artists who made a specific sport of trying to visit different kinds of genres or mediums or modes - not just 'western' or 'detective', but comedy/tragedy, epic and miniature, traditional/experimental.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Sports
Epic
Mean
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The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like - or what some artist has decided the character really looks like - because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Book
Character
Hate
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I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.
Jonathan Lethem / Novelist
Character
Psychology
Writing
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