Top 140 Jonathan Lethem Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.”

— Jonathan Lethem

52. “Life is fundamentally up for grabs.”

— Jonathan Lethem

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

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

— Jonathan Lethem

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

— Jonathan Lethem

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

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

— Jonathan Lethem

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

75. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

87. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

94. “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

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

— Jonathan Lethem

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

— Jonathan Lethem

97. “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

98. “I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It’s like drinking wine that’s not ready.”

— Jonathan Lethem

99. “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

100. “Like other names I censored lately, this was a vote against invoking monsters, against etching their reality into the air.”

— Jonathan Lethem