Quotes by 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.
• It was good while it was good.
• 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.
• It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.
• 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.
• Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.
• Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
• I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
• I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
• 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.
• 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.
• I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.
• 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 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 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 try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
• I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.
• I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.