110+ Jonathan Lethem Quotes On Culture, Order And Music

Jonathan Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, as well as his short story collection The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye. Lethem's writing is often characterized by its eclectic combination of genres, blending elements of science fiction, detective fiction, and autobiography. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jonathan Lethem on love, leadership, life.

Top 10 Jonathan Lethem Quotes

1. I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
5. I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.
6. What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
7. 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.
8. I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
9. Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
• Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.
• Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.
• It was good while it was good.
• There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.
• Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.
• Every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It's impossible.
• Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash.
• I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.
• There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

Jonathan Lethem Quotes About Love

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

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

I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented. — Jonathan Lethem

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

Jonathan Lethem Quotes About Life

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

Life is fundamentally up for grabs — Jonathan Lethem

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

My writing life is pretty simple - I try to work every day, almost always in the mornings - and I can only write fiction effectively for about three or at the most four hours. No big mysteries, I just sit down and try to advance the cause a little bit every day. — Jonathan Lethem

It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed. — Jonathan Lethem

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

I suppose in a way most of my characters are non-consumers, not terribly interested in all the little baubles and artifacts of contemporary life. — Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem Quotes About Order

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

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

Good films demand to be looked at several times in order to be observed completely. — Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem Quotes About Music

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

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

I had an all-Fear of Music iPod, just versions of the 11 songs from the record. No other songs allowed. — Jonathan Lethem

I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over. — Jonathan Lethem

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

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. — Jonathan Lethem

For me, music is sort of the art that I can't incorporate into my person the way I want to. — Jonathan Lethem

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

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

Jonathan Lethem Quotes About Writing

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

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

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. — Jonathan Lethem

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. — Jonathan Lethem

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

When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode... I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure. — Jonathan Lethem

I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale. — Jonathan Lethem

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

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

Jonathan Lethem Quotes About Book

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

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

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

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

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

I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready. — Jonathan Lethem

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books. — Jonathan Lethem

Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth. — Jonathan Lethem

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

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

Jonathan Lethem Quotes About Work

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 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

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

Jonathan Lethem Quotes About Arts

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

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

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

What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos. — Jonathan Lethem

I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume. — Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

...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

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. — Jonathan Lethem

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

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

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. — Jonathan Lethem

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. — Jonathan Lethem

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

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

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

I'm gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts . . . I [like to] create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I alone know the flawed homely process along the way. — Jonathan Lethem

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

I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice. — Jonathan Lethem

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

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

A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording. — Jonathan Lethem

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

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! — Jonathan Lethem

Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked. — Jonathan Lethem

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all. — Jonathan Lethem

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

Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible. — Jonathan Lethem

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

You can't be deep without a surface — Jonathan Lethem

I met someone who lives in an elevator. — 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

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

It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area. — Jonathan Lethem

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

I try to write every day. I don't beat myself up about word counts, or how many hours are ticking by on the clock before I'm allowed to go and do something else. I just try to keep a hand in and work every single day, even if there are other demands or I'm on a book tour or have the flu or something, because then I keep my unconscious engaged with the book. Then I'm always a little bit writing, no matter what else I'm doing. — Jonathan Lethem

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

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

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'm a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas. — Jonathan Lethem

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

The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't. — Jonathan Lethem

Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble. — Jonathan Lethem

All paths lead nowhere; choose one with heart... — Jonathan Lethem

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

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. — Jonathan Lethem

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

Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance for that you're in great trouble. If you want to call it a writer's block... that doesn't seem a very useful name for that kind of abiding that I think is the essence of the work. — Jonathan Lethem

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

I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts. — Jonathan Lethem

The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it. — Jonathan Lethem

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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Jonathan Lethem

1. Jonathan Lethem's work emphasizes the importance of embracing one's unique identity and perspective in order to find success and fulfillment.
2. He also encourages readers to take risks and be open to new experiences in order to discover their passions and purpose in life.
3. Finally, Lethem's work celebrates the power of storytelling and its ability to bring people together and create meaningful connections.