Top 140 Jonathan Lethem Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don’t understand prose. They’re so used to reading journalism – clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information – facts, more than just the surfaces of things.”

— Jonathan Lethem

102. “It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.”

— Jonathan Lethem

103. “Destroy the traces. I’d never tried to do that. Instead I’d lived in their midst for thirty years, oblivious, a blind man fancying himself invisible.”

— Jonathan Lethem

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction – by skipping the parts that bored me.”

— Jonathan Lethem

108. “I don’t have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I’m doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.”

— Jonathan Lethem

109. “There’s something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.”

— Jonathan Lethem

110. “Yet I’m making a book and I’m going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won’t believe in it and it won’t be real to me until there’s a finished book I can hold.”

— Jonathan Lethem

111. “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.”

— Jonathan Lethem

112. “As much as I care about historical context – I’m very eager to read a really great historical account.”

— Jonathan Lethem

113. “Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.”

— Jonathan Lethem

114. “I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own.”

— Jonathan Lethem

115. “I was famously in love with a woman who had no time to spare, not even a breath, for she dwelled in a place beyond time or the reach of anyone’s Rolodex, her every breath measured out of pressurized tanks.”

— Jonathan Lethem

116. “I don’t write about anything I don’t love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.”

— Jonathan Lethem

117. “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

118. “The speaker was stringy and angular, his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, his plaid workman’s shirtsleeves rolled up around his pale biceps. Journalism major, I guessed.”

— Jonathan Lethem

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

— Jonathan Lethem

120. “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

121. “I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I’m part of the human world.”

— Jonathan Lethem

122. “The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk.”

— Jonathan Lethem

123. “It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.”

— Jonathan Lethem

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

— Jonathan Lethem

125. “Artists freeze themselves into these weird postures that are meant to be impressive and involving, then they fling them out into the world like Polaroids, and then they move on. And I’m stuck in this intense relationship to the Polaroid.”

— Jonathan Lethem

126. “I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn’t be bogged down by irrelevant details.”

— Jonathan Lethem

127. “I suppose in a way most of my characters are non-consumers, not terribly interested in all the little baubles and artifacts of contemporary life.”

— Jonathan Lethem

128. “Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash.”

— Jonathan Lethem

129. “When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode. I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure.”

— Jonathan Lethem

130. “I‘ve always agreed with the view that – with science fiction – its predictive powers were the least important or least relevant aspect of its public profile. I always loved stuff like Orwell‘s 1984, where he explicitly said “It‘s 1948, reversed.” I liked writers that were doing allegorical, satirical, fantastical versions of everyday life.”

— Jonathan Lethem

131. “It’s now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.”

— Jonathan Lethem

132. “I’d forgotten my identity as the world’s most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead.”

— Jonathan Lethem

133. “As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel – something that I could never have written myself – I’m still looking at it a little bit like a technician.”

— Jonathan Lethem

134. “For me, music is sort of the art that I can’t incorporate into my person the way I want to.”

— Jonathan Lethem

135. “I was playing it existential, and maybe a bit stupid, but it was the only way I knew how to play it.”

— Jonathan Lethem

136. “I’m learning to hate the sound of my own voice.”

— Jonathan Lethem

137. “There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.”

— Jonathan Lethem

138. “I am relaxed. It’s just buried under layers of incredulity and panic. But underneath those I’m very relaxed.”

— Jonathan Lethem

139. “I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.”

— Jonathan Lethem

140. “I’m a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.”

— Jonathan Lethem

141. “I suppose there was never a reason for tearing down a cabin or scrapping a stopped automobile, if you had all those acres.”

— Jonathan Lethem

142. “Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.”

— Jonathan Lethem

143. “As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another.”

— Jonathan Lethem

144. “Once I had it free, I gobbled the sandwich like a nature-film otter cracking an oyster on its stomach: knees up in the wiring under the dashboard, my elbows jammed against the steering wheel, my chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth.”

— Jonathan Lethem

145. “I gained an insight, a purloined-letter kind of thing.”

— Jonathan Lethem

146. “This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think.”

— Jonathan Lethem

147. “Here’s the strangeness of having a Tourette’s brain, then: no control in my personal experiment of self. What might be only strangeness must always be auditioned for relegation to the domain of symptom, just as symptoms always push into other domains, demanding the chance to audition for their moment of acuity or relevance, their brief shot – coulda been a contender! – at centrality. Personalityness. There’s a lot of traffic in my head, and it’s two-way.”

— Jonathan Lethem