Jonathan Lethem Quotes

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

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 can be embraced.

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.

All paths lead nowhere; choose one with heart...

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.

Life is fundamentally up for grabs

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.

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.

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

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 fragments of memory.

Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.

Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.

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.

I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.

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.

Music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can't really make it. It's like a car I can't drive.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

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.

I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow I keep myself sane.