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"I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me."
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"She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.It didn't."

"Where do you think they've gone?' he said.'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.''Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.''But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?'Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.'Most people seem to manage,' she said.She reached across the table and touched his hand."

"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."

"Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."

"Vampires did not avoid mirrors because they cast no reflection but because mirrors became so unflattering with the illusion of fuzzy focus wrenched away."

"Are you naked?" he rasped out. Swallowing hard, she nodded."

"Oh my God, you're such a guy!" "I'm glad you noticed." The glint in his dark eyes was purely wicked."

"Caleb shifted uncomfortably as he closed the door behind him. For a moment, he'd thought she'd been naked under the sheet. But, it had been a nude-colored type of top. Didn't seem to matter, the sight had kicked his fantasies into overdrive. She tried to hide herself, but the nightlight next to her bed cast a soft amber glow around her shining right through the thin sheet, illuminating her small pert breasts perfectly even through the top. He couldn't live under the same roof as her and not go insane. He would make an announcement tomorrow. She was off-limits."
Explore more quotes by Jonathan Lethem

"I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram."

"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 learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me."

"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."

"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 had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts."

"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."

"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'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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