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"It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want."
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Exlpore more Expectation quotes
"Long ago, before I had ever seen a diamond, I read about them and I tried to imagine what they would be like ... When I saw a real diamond in a lady's ring one day I was so disappointed I cried. Of course, it was very lovely but it wasn't my idea of a diamond."
"Everyone wants everyone to be perfect for them, but they don't want themselves to be perfect for others..."
"Expectation wasn't just about what people expected of you. It was about what you expected of yourself."
"Expectations hurt, be it sorry, be it thank you."
"Assuming what people want is about as controlled as using fireworks to start a fire."
"I can establish the expectation of retributive justice. Have we done that? No."
"We live in an era of revolution, the revolution of rising expectations."
"Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable."
"The school was prone to dishing out punishments for anything creative that didn't fit with expectation - I just followed the logic and figured the folk club was probably much the same."
Explore more quotes by Jonathan Lethem
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me."
"I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously."
"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."
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