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"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."
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Exlpore more Fiction quotes
"What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage."
"When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately."
"When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for the planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying."
"Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction."
"Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic."
Explore more quotes by Jonathan Lethem
"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."
"I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit."
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