Top 140 Jonathan Lethem Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Yes! I’m the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.”

— Jonathan Lethem

2. “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

3. “Every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It’s impossible.”

— Jonathan Lethem

4. “I’m tightly wound. I’m a loose cannon. Both – I’m a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose.”

— Jonathan Lethem

5. “Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.”

— Jonathan Lethem

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “When people call something “original,” 9 out of 10 times they just don’t know the references or original sources involved.”

— Jonathan Lethem

11. “Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.”

— Jonathan Lethem

12. “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

13. “I have no one to blame for the construction for myself, of course, but I’m always surprised and slightly sulky when I realize people are buying the whole thing.”

— Jonathan Lethem

14. “Picture us, five floating nudists in oxygen masks, ragged with fatigue and degrees of schock, squeezing the last beads of antifreeze from our hair.”

— Jonathan Lethem

15. “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

16. “What age is a black boy when he learns he’s scary?”

— Jonathan Lethem

17. “You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.”

— Jonathan Lethem

18. “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

19. “Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.”

— Jonathan Lethem

20. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

22. “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

23. “I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don’t approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. And scissors – that’s beyond the pale.”

— Jonathan Lethem

24. “My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.”

— Jonathan Lethem

25. “Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We’re all nerds, on one subject or another.”

— Jonathan Lethem

26. “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

27. “I raised that kid like I was running an egg-and-spoon race through a minefield, and he was the egg.”

— Jonathan Lethem

28. “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

29. “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

30. “But the day I can’t shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I’m washed up for keeps.”

— Jonathan Lethem

31. “Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.”

— Jonathan Lethem

32. “Waves, sky, trees, Essrog – I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.”

— Jonathan Lethem

33. “When I was a boy I used to love pizza, and whenever my father took me to the pizzeria I’d order two slices. And I’d sit and he’d watch me wolfing down the first slice with my eyes on the second. I wasn’t even tasting that first slice. And one day my father said to me, “Son, you need to learn that while you’re eating the first slice of pizza, eat the first slice. Because right now you’re eating the second slice before you’ve finished the first.”

— Jonathan Lethem

34. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

36. “Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director’s cut? Get out of the car.”

— Jonathan Lethem

37. “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

38. “Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.”

— Jonathan Lethem

39. “With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you’re on page 300. You can’t do that with film. It just charges ahead.”

— Jonathan Lethem

40. “Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.”

— Jonathan Lethem

41. “I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.”

— Jonathan Lethem

42. “I met someone who lives in an elevator.”

— Jonathan Lethem

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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