Top 100 Jonathan Lethem Quotes
#1. I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.
Jonathan Lethem
#2. Good films demand to be looked at several times in order to be observed completely.
Jonathan Lethem
#3. A shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I'd overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker.
Jonathan Lethem
#4. He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing
so it was my duty to loathe him instead.
Jonathan Lethem
#5. By removing the stories from the morass of things that surround us, I'm hoping to achieve some kind of purer approach to emotional life.
Jonathan Lethem
#6. I was playing it existential, and maybe a bit stupid, but it was the only way I knew how to play it.
Jonathan Lethem
#7. 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.
Jonathan Lethem
#8. 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
#9. Paranoid art, unlike paranoid persons, also distrusts itself. And so, paranoid art is the ultimate opposite, the urgent opposite, of complacent art.
Jonathan Lethem
#10. 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
#11. There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.
Jonathan Lethem
#12. 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.
Jonathan Lethem
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.
Jonathan Lethem
#16. On Telegraph, she stopped him in front of Walgreens, put the sack into his hands, a finger to her lips. "I'll come back." He was left to contemplate the sidewalk, full of listless earring vendors ready with their piercing guns.
Jonathan Lethem
#17. You can't reclaim a thing that changes as you touch it.
Jonathan Lethem
#19. 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
#20. Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.
Jonathan Lethem
#21. The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun-worn pier, and the humans had just gotten the news and taken a powder.
Jonathan Lethem
#23. 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.
Jonathan Lethem
#24. Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
Jonathan Lethem
#25. I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.
Jonathan Lethem
#26. The speaker was stringy and angular, his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, his plaid workman's shirtsleeves rolled up around his pale biceps. Journalism major, I guessed.
Jonathan Lethem
#27. Relax,' she said. 'There's nothing wrong with a slow, awkward beginning. The text for the whole relationship, the sustaining mythos, is built in the first few encounters. The whirl of emotions, the push and pull. So the more of this kind of material we generate, the better.
Jonathan Lethem
#28. She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek ... "Don't do that", I said. "You just met me. This is New York.
Jonathan Lethem
#29. 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.
Jonathan Lethem
#30. Open duh computer." Germans ought to farm out all positions of petty authority. The accent remained too full of implication.
Jonathan Lethem
#32. Behold the onset of my flinty tone. Along with so much else, a soft-tissue sarcoma can apparently drain the exultation from one's prose.
Jonathan Lethem
#33. 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
#34. Despite their authoritarian light show, those ice-cream trucks of death couldn't do any more for Perkus's murdered infatuation, his crushed crush, than could keening Greek chorus, or a moaning witch doctor.
Jonathan Lethem
#36. It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
Jonathan Lethem
#37. Prince's music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger.
Jonathan Lethem
#39. I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.
Jonathan Lethem
#40. We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.
Jonathan Lethem
#41. I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
Jonathan Lethem
#42. Once you fall into habits, I think, you're dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you've done in the past.
Jonathan Lethem
#43. 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
#44. My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.
Jonathan Lethem
#46. I'd forgotten my identity as the world's most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead.
Jonathan Lethem
#47. I had an all-Fear of Music iPod, just versions of the 11 songs from the record. No other songs allowed.
Jonathan Lethem
#48. There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.
Jonathan Lethem
#49. Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.
Jonathan Lethem
#50. Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.
Jonathan Lethem
#52. The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren't New Yorkers anyway, they'd suffered some basic misunderstanding. The two boys on the walkway, apparently standing still they were moving faster than the cars.
Nineteen seventy-five.
Jonathan Lethem
#53. 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.
Jonathan Lethem
#54. Someday I'd change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
Jonathan Lethem
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. The invisible are always so resolutely invisible, until you see them.
Jonathan Lethem
#59. The revving heart of my hopefulness, kicked into gear anew, is the most precious thing about me, I refuse to vilify it.
Jonathan Lethem
#60. 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
#61. Everything funny in a not-funny-at-all kind of way. Sarcasm as something you practiced like karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines.
Jonathan Lethem
#62. Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car.
Jonathan Lethem
#63. Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.
Jonathan Lethem
#64. The waiting area was jammed with the sort of egalitarian cross-section only genuine misery can provide: Hispanics and blacks and Russians and various indeterminate, red-eyed teenage girls with children you prayed were siblings; junkie veterans petitioning for painkillers they wouldn't get;
Jonathan Lethem
#66. I've always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.
Jonathan Lethem
#67. 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.
Jonathan Lethem
#68. Her fiercest sincerities were translated by the male ego, on arrival, into daffy flirtation. (p. 24)
Jonathan Lethem
#69. This kiss would be with me, invisible badge or scar, when I went back to the apartment.
Jonathan Lethem
#70. Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.
Jonathan Lethem
#71. The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.
Jonathan Lethem
#72. One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.
Jonathan Lethem
#74. The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time *isn't*.
Jonathan Lethem
#75. Except science now tells us that luck is there whether you acknowledge it or not. And I'm afraid in your case I see the signs of a history of bad luck. Not even a latency so much as a full-blown case going completely ignored for lack of context.
Jonathan Lethem
#77. When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.
Jonathan Lethem
#78. 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.
Jonathan Lethem
#79. 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
#80. Zelmo was nearly bellowing by the time he raised his glass to the tables center. 'To the human heart!' Diners at other tables glanced to see what was the matter.
Jonathan Lethem
#81. I'm a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.
Jonathan Lethem
#82. I'm not too embarrassed to say I'm the definition of the target audience. This is my generation, the one of exalting music in album form.
Jonathan Lethem
#83. 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 made substantial amounts of money for one another.
Jonathan Lethem
#84. There was language everywhere; you could read the city, the city was a grammar
Jonathan Lethem
#85. He couldn't be more than twenty-five, but he obviously lived enough to have things to regret. He looked like he'd taken a long fall a short time ago. Pieces of the man he'd been were jumbled up with the new guy, the lost soul.
Jonathan Lethem
#86. My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
Jonathan Lethem
#88. I'm not planning what I listen to, except when I think the music can guide me to some emotional place I want to be reminded of.
Jonathan Lethem
#89. You don't have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.
Jonathan Lethem
#90. Sometimes it's better not to think in questions, but I can't seem to get out of the habit.
Jonathan Lethem
#91. Everyone's body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed.
Jonathan Lethem
#92. 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 example.
Jonathan Lethem
#93. I'm tightly wound. I'm a loose cannon. Both - I'm a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose.
Jonathan Lethem
#94. 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.
Jonathan Lethem
#95. 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
#96. I have no one to blame for the construction for myself, of course, but I'm always surprised and slightly sulky when I realize people are buying the whole thing.
Jonathan Lethem
#97. As much as I care about historical context - I'm very eager to read a really great historical account.
Jonathan Lethem
#98. I raised that kid like I was running an egg-and-spoon race through a minefield, and he was the egg.
Jonathan Lethem
#99. I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own.
Jonathan Lethem
#100. Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.
Jonathan Lethem
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