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"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."
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Explore more quotes by Jonathan Lethem
"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."
"Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit."
"It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want."
"Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another."
"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."
"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 keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow, I keep myself sane."
"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 learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me."
"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."
Exlpore more Art quotes
"Always seek beauty to create a beautiful life."
"For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle."
"I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across-not to just depict life-or criticize it-but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way."
"Make movies my friend " make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul."
"My poems are only bits of scratchingon the floor of acage."
"A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart."
"For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations."
"Some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ..."
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