Top 100 Lethem Quotes
#1. Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' is no movie-of-the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Maybe his Tourette's is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick with depth, with soul.
Gary Krist
#2. When you live in Brooklyn, if you throw a rock, you'll hit a writer - Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Paul Auster.
Libba Bray
#3. 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
#4. I definitely care about how the concept of New York punk was constructed, and why it mattered. But I wasn't gonna do that. Partly because I'm not a great journalist.
Jonathan Lethem
#5. But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.
Jonathan Lethem
#6. 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
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. His recording career spans just a decade: Rude was silenced by drug abuse and domestic tragedy at the end of the '70s.
Jonathan Lethem
#12. The alphabet Miss Poobner taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters
Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on
and something insipid about the parade of grinning letters defeated Dylan's will utterly.
Jonathan Lethem
#13. There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.
Jonathan Lethem
#14. 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
#15. I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.
Jonathan Lethem
#16. Bruno's brain might have parachuted somewhere over the Atlantic.
Jonathan Lethem
#17. Anyone could see it all coming and no one could possibly stop it and that was the beautiful thing. Friday night was open wide and writ in stone
Jonathan Lethem
#19. Open duh computer." Germans ought to farm out all positions of petty authority. The accent remained too full of implication.
Jonathan Lethem
#20. 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
#21. The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk.
Jonathan Lethem
#22. 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
#23. Destroy the traces. I'd never tried to do that. Instead I'd lived in their midst for thirty years, oblivious, a blind man fancying himself invisible.
Jonathan Lethem
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I'm forever writing around a void - I guess I don't have to explain to you why that is.
Jonathan Lethem
#28. I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.
Jonathan Lethem
#29. I'd forgotten my identity as the world's most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead.
Jonathan Lethem
#31. My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.
Jonathan Lethem
#32. 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
#33. Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another.
Jonathan Lethem
#34. Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had ben taken from me, stripped off like clothes I'd only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious.
Jonathan Lethem
#35. 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
#36. I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
Jonathan Lethem
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.
Jonathan Lethem
#41. I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.
Jonathan Lethem
#42. 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
#43. I suppose there was never a reason for tearing down a cabin or scrapping a stopped automobile, if you had all those acres.
Jonathan Lethem
#44. I was famously in love with a woman who had no time to spare, not even a breath, for she dwelled in a place beyond time or the reach of anyone's Rolodex, her every breath measured out of pressurized tanks.
Jonathan Lethem
#46. (I)t was by Cicero's attainments that that he'd gained special witness to the liberals' adjustment to a brush with actual equality.
Jonathan Lethem
#47. Prince's music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger.
Jonathan Lethem
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#52. How's it feel to be a worthless jumbo diddly-ass puppetool?
Jonathan Lethem
#53. I'd never pondered the bourgeois implications of an earplug.
Jonathan Lethem
#54. You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.
Jonathan Lethem
#55. To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.
Jonathan Lethem
#56. 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.
Jonathan Lethem
#57. 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
#58. There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.
Jonathan Lethem
#59. 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
#60. Paranoid art, unlike paranoid persons, also distrusts itself. And so, paranoid art is the ultimate opposite, the urgent opposite, of complacent art.
Jonathan Lethem
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. I was playing it existential, and maybe a bit stupid, but it was the only way I knew how to play it.
Jonathan Lethem
#65. It was a rebus of heartbreak, misfortune a dog could parse.
Jonathan Lethem
#66. 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.
Jonathan Lethem
#67. The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.
Jonathan Lethem
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. exemplified the dull rigidity of Singapore's old colonial fantasies about itself.
Jonathan Lethem
#73. I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.
Jonathan Lethem
#74. Good films demand to be looked at several times in order to be observed completely.
Jonathan Lethem
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.
Jonathan Lethem
#79. In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.
Jonathan Lethem
#80. I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.
Jonathan Lethem
#81. May one plead, Your Honor, postmodernism as an involuntary condition?
Jonathan Lethem
#82. For me, music is sort of the art that I can't incorporate into my person the way I want to.
Jonathan Lethem
#83. Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
Jonathan Lethem
#85. 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
#87. 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
#88. Mingus Rude, Arthur Lomb, Gabriel Stern and Tim Vandertooth, even Aaron K. Doily: Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another. He took it in stride by now.
Jonathan Lethem
#89. I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.
Jonathan Lethem
#90. 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
#92. You can't reclaim a thing that changes as you touch it.
Jonathan Lethem
#93. 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
#94. I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.
Jonathan Lethem
#95. 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
#97. 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
#98. I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.
Jonathan Lethem
#99. 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
#100. 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
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