Top 140 Jonathan Lethem Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “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

52. “Good films demand to be looked at several times in order to be observed completely.”

— Jonathan Lethem

53. “Life is fundamentally up for grabs.”

— Jonathan Lethem

54. “There’s never any percentage in being ahead of your time.”

— Jonathan Lethem

55. “Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.”

— Jonathan Lethem

56. “Guilt wants to cover all the bases, be everywhere at once, reach into the past to tweak, neaten and repair. Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows uselessly, inelegantly from one helpless human to another, contemptuous of perimeters, doomed to be mistaken or refused on delivery.”

— Jonathan Lethem

57. “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

58. “He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing – so it was my duty to loathe him instead.”

— Jonathan Lethem

59. “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

60. “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

61. “I don’t paint anymore. I haven’t since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.”

— Jonathan Lethem

62. “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

63. “May one plead, Your Honor, postmodernism as an involuntary condition?”

— Jonathan Lethem

64. “I can’t bear the silent ringing in my skull.”

— Jonathan Lethem

65. “One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.”

— Jonathan Lethem

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything’s neat and tidy. In America everybody’s already wandering around lost.”

— Jonathan Lethem

70. “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

71. “The world’s large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.”

— Jonathan Lethem

72. “To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.”

— Jonathan Lethem

73. “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

74. “Apologies aren’t something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror.”

— Jonathan Lethem

75. “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

76. “Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you’re right up against her naked soul.”

— Jonathan Lethem

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.”

— Jonathan Lethem

83. “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

84. “She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek... “Don’t do that”, I said. “You just met me. This is New York.”

— Jonathan Lethem

85. “I believe that written stories will continue to survive because they answer an essential human need. I think movies might disappear before the novel disappears, because the novel is really one of the only places in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.”

— Jonathan Lethem

86. “I’m not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It’s one of the generating forces that’s made fiction interesting to people. But that’s not my concern. I’m interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.”

— Jonathan Lethem

87. “How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.”

— Jonathan Lethem

88. “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

89. “Sometimes it’s better not to think in questions, but I can’t seem to get out of the habit.”

— Jonathan Lethem

90. “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

91. “I’m a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.”

— Jonathan Lethem

92. “I had an all-Fear of Music iPod, just versions of the 11 songs from the record. No other songs allowed.”

— Jonathan Lethem

93. “Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.”

— Jonathan Lethem

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “This kiss would be with me, invisible badge or scar, when I went back to the apartment.”

— Jonathan Lethem

98. “Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.”

— Jonathan Lethem

99. “His jabber had a glottal, chanted quality, seemingly designed to guide you past the territory where you might wish to tell him to shut up already or even to strike him, into a realm of baffled wonderment as you considered the white noise of a nerd’s id in full song.”

— Jonathan Lethem

100. “All Thinking is Wishful.”

— Jonathan Lethem