Words matter. These are the best Jonathan Lethem Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
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.
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.
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.
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 learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction – by skipping the parts that bored me.
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.
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.
It’s now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.
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.
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.
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.
