top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes
"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."
"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
"I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once-and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters."
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
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 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."
"The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around."
"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 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."
"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."
"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 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."
"Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another."
"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."
bottom of page