Jonathan Lethem Quotes

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

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 head and work from that mental hologram.

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 sideshow.

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

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.

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

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!

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.

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

It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

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.

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 can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

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.

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

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 worshipped those ideals.

...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?

I have no one to blame for the construction for myself, of course, but I'm always surprised and slightly sulky when I realizeВ people are buying the whole thing.

My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.

I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.

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.

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

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

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

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.

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

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.

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 love of film...

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 been able to shift into fiction.

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 become my trademark.

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.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

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.

My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.

I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.

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 poor. Materially, not much changed.

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.

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 virtual space.

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 simply, is allowed to talk crazy.

Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.

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.

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

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.

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.

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.

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.

Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.

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.

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