Jonathan Lethem Quotes

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

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

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

- Jonathan Lethem

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

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

- Jonathan Lethem

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

- Jonathan Lethem

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

In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.

- Jonathan Lethem

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

- Jonathan Lethem

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

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

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

- Jonathan Lethem

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

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.

- Jonathan Lethem

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

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

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.

- Jonathan Lethem

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

- Jonathan Lethem

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

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

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

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

- Jonathan Lethem

My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.

- Jonathan Lethem

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

- Jonathan Lethem

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

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

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

- Jonathan Lethem

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

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

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