Jonathan Lethem Quotes

It was a rebus of heartbreak, misfortune a dog could parse. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I hate lending, or borrowing - if you want me to read a book, tell me about it, or buy me a copy outright. Your loaned edition sits in my house like a real grievance. And in lieu of lending books, I buy extra copies of those I want to give away, which gives me the added pleasure of buying books I love again and again.
Jonathan Lethem ~ Leah Price

Everything funny in a not-funny-at-all kind of way. Sarcasm as something you practiced like karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I have no one to blame for the construction for myself, of course, but I'm always surprised and slightly sulky when I realize people are buying the whole thing. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible. ~ Jonathan Lethem

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. ~ Jonathan Lethem

How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end.
As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all? ~ Jonathan Lethem

The restaurant, Bongiorno's, was bad and didn't know it. Everything was presented with a passive-aggressive flourish, as though we probably weren't savvy enough to appreciate the oregano-heavy garlic bread, the individual bowls for olive pits, the starched napkins stuffed into our wineglasses, or the waiter's strained enunciation of a long list of specials. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Life is fundamentally up for grabs ~ Jonathan Lethem

What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Her fiercest sincerities were translated by the male ego, on arrival, into daffy flirtation. (p. 24) ~ Jonathan Lethem

Not everything needed to rise to converge: It could just drift together into the indiscernible middle, and bewilder you. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The earth itself was unchangeable, the endless tracts of sand and water and pavement. It was the people, the perturbable madmen who roamed its surface, who viewed the world as transient and broken. Everett wished the earth could somehow reach up and still them, the crazy people, and invest them with its silence and permanence and depth. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Just handling this ocean of different books - new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten - it was literature as this giant mosaic of texts and experiments and attitudes. I think it's just very liberating to break out of a great man's theory of history.
I guess I've always liked working from that sense of - what would you call it? - license that the margins permit. I always just visualize myself writing books that were meant one day to be dusty, forgotten volumes being encountered by intrepid browsers in a used bookstore. It was a much less freighted way to think about trying to enter the conversation than to imagine I had to write The Great Gatsby. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Paranoid art, unlike paranoid persons, also distrusts itself. And so, paranoid art is the ultimate opposite, the urgent opposite, of complacent art. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I'm not planning what I listen to, except when I think the music can guide me to some emotional place I want to be reminded of. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Anyone could see it all coming and no one could possibly stop it and that was the beautiful thing. Friday night was open wide and writ in stone ~ Jonathan Lethem

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I never have been a musician; I'm not actually capable. Because I can't even pretend to acquire the gift, all of my first feelings about art are still attached to music. I look at it yearningly, I look at it wonderingly. I behold it from afar, as something unattainable, something outside of myself, from which I can take nourishment, but I can't domesticate and master. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I'm not too embarrassed to say I'm the definition of the target audience. This is my generation, the one of exalting music in album form. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing
in my collection and others
in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music
vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison
room as brain
is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look. ~ Jonathan Lethem

To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions. ~ Jonathan Lethem

His ironies were ghoulish now. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Sometimes it's better not to think in questions, but I can't seem to get out of the habit. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I'm helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don't. Yet I go around forming sentences. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I had an all-Fear of Music iPod, just versions of the 11 songs from the record. No other songs allowed. ~ Jonathan Lethem

People have to be patient when they're talking to a nervous person. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Once I had it free, I gobbled the sandwich like a nature-film otter cracking an oyster on its stomach: knees up in the wiring under the dashboard, my elbows jammed against the steering wheel, my chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I've always agreed with the view that - with science fiction - its predictive powers were the least important or least relevant aspect of its public profile. I always loved stuff like Orwell's 1984, where he explicitly said "It's 1948, reversed." I liked writers that were doing allegorical, satirical, fantastical versions of everyday life. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan. ~ Jonathan Lethem

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. ~ Jonathan Lethem

We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centrepiece, as incoherent as a verb-less sentence. ~ Jonathan Lethem

First, however, and feeling real excitement at the thought, the good burst of adrenaline at last, Behringer wanted to dismantle the sockets and loosen his patient's eyes. Behringer ~ Jonathan Lethem

A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording. ~ Jonathan Lethem

We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream. ~ Jonathan Lethem

If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid.
Your school wasn't on fire, you were. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I am relaxed. It's just buried under layers of incredulity and panic. But underneath those I'm very relaxed. ~ Jonathan Lethem

No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth. ~ Jonathan Lethem

This is a dystopia, but also a post-apocalypse. The dystopia survived the apocalypse, nobody can get their head around it - too bad! You can do post-apocalypse things, survivalist stuff, rationing, killing, new tribalism, but you can also go the dystopia route, struggle against the decadent lords and masters, smash the seductive machine that's controlling your head. Just because you're crazy doesn't mean you're not also stupid, and neither precludes the possibility that you've got your boot on the neck of someone even worse off. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Apologies aren't something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror ~ Jonathan Lethem

You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry. ~ Jonathan Lethem

We writers aren't sculpting in DNA, or even clay or mud, but words, sentences, paragraphs, syntax, voice; materials issued by tongue or fingertips but which upon release dissolve into the atmosphere, into cloud, confection, specter. Language, as a vehicle, is a lemon, a hot rod painted with thrilling flames but crazily erratic to drive, riddled with bugs like innate self-consciousness, embedded metaphors and symbols, helpless intertextuality, and so forth. Despite being regularly driven on prosaic errands (interoffice memos, supermarket receipts, etc.), it tends to veer on its misaligned chassis into the ditch of abstraction, of dream. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Everyone's body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed. ~ Jonathan Lethem

What exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety? ~ Jonathan Lethem

Baader-Meinhof Gruppe, they are called also." "Yes. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I'm a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost. ~ Jonathan Lethem

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. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice. ~ Jonathan Lethem

This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences - nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn't rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences:
"Esther's cleavage is something to be noticed" or "You can't have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture" or "I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort" or "I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed."
At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we'd rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Nobody said anything while I opened the bag and took out the egg salad sandwich. It was one of those funny moments when a bit of normal human activity embarrasses everybody out of their bluster and hostility, and roles are momentarily laid aside. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you're right up against her naked soul. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Of all records, Chase, Some Girls! It was in a clutch of the most horrendous crap, J. Geils Band, Sniff 'n' the Tears, the kind of albums you'd use for landfill. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It's impossible. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Despite their authoritarian light show, those ice-cream trucks of death couldn't do any more for Perkus's murdered infatuation, his crushed crush, than could keening Greek chorus, or a moaning witch doctor. ~ Jonathan Lethem

His jabber had a glottal, chanted quality, seemingly designed to guide you past the territory where you might wish to tell him to shut up already or even to strike him, into a realm of baffled wonderment as you considered the white noise of a nerd's id in full song. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun-worn pier, and the humans had just gotten the news and taken a powder. ~ Jonathan Lethem

There are no metaphysics. ~ Jonathan Lethem

It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked. ~ Jonathan Lethem

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I don't know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about their work. It's something I find very difficult. And yet, one does have some sense of responsibility towards one's publishers, to the people trying to sell the book. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Punctuation! We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and Biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day. Erotically enjambed in our loft bed, Clea patrolled my utterances for subject, verb, predicate, as a chef in a five-star kitchen would minister a recipe, insuring that a soufflé or sourdough would rise. A good brave sentence ("I can hardly bear your heel at my nape without roaring") might jolly Clea to instant climax. We'd rise from the bed giggling, clutching for glasses of cold water that sat in pools of their own sweat on bedside tables. The sentences had liberated our higher orgasms, nothing to sneeze at. Similarly, we were also sure that sentences of the right quality could end this hideous endless war, if only certain standards were adopted at the higher levels. They never would be. All the media trumpeted the Administration's lousy grammar. ~ Jonathan Lethem

My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The Joker's henchmen break into the museum and empty the display cases; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes a part of the exhibition. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Someday I'd change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I was playing it existential, and maybe a bit stupid, but it was the only way I knew how to play it. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter? ~ Jonathan Lethem

Matthew and Lucinda felt at the exact edge of their lives, feeling them close, closer, as near at hand as yet elusive as the wind that whistled in their hair: the true complete lives in which they would at last drown, the oceanic voyage into their thirties and beyond, through which their inchoate yearnings would either be soothed or disappointed, or both. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms. ~ Jonathan Lethem

You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma. (p. 5) ~ Jonathan Lethem

I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The desires our little family couldn't afford to indulge had never seemed important, only snobbish and silly and somehow misplaced, like Thurston Howell's priorities on Gilligan's Island. Besides, I'd had as much or more money than most kids I'd known in Brooklyn, if somewhat less than the majority of my Manhattan schoolmates at Stuyvesant, so figured I was somewhere in the middle. Yeah, sure, that was it: I was middle class. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Dylan's friend Linus Millberg appears out of the crowd with a cup of beer and shouts, 'Dorothy is John Lennon, the Scarecrow is Paul McCartney, the Tin Woodman is George Harrison, the Lion's Ringo.'
'Star Trek,' commands Dylan over the lousy twangy country CB's is playing between sets.
'Easy,' Linus shouts back. "Kirk's John, Spock's Paul, Bones is George, Scotty is Ringo. Or Chekov, after the first season. Doesn't matter, it's like a Scotty-Chekov-combination Ringo. Spare parts are always surplus Georges or Ringos.'
'But isn't Spock-lacks-a-heart and McCoy-lacks-a-brain like Woodman and Scarecrow? So Dorothy's Kirk?'
'You don't get it. That's just a superficial coincidence. The Beatle thing is an archetype, it's like the basic human formation. Everything naturally forms into a Beatles, people can't help it.'
'Say the types again.'
'Responsible-parent genius-parent genius-child clown-child.'
'Okay, do Star Wars.'
'Luke Paul, Han Solo John, Chewbacca George, the robots Ringo.'
'Tonight Show.'
'Uh, Johnny Carson Paul, the guest John, Ed McMahon Ringo, whatisname George.'
'Doc Severinson.'
'Yeah, right. See, everything revolves around John, even Paul. That's why John's the guest.'
'And Severinson's quiet but talented, like a Wookie.'
'You begin to understand. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The tragedy of being old is you can no longer apply whats taken you so long to learn (Kissing The Beehive) ~ Jonathan Lethem

I've always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The invisible are always so resolutely invisible, until you see them. ~ Jonathan Lethem

For me, music is sort of the art that I can't incorporate into my person the way I want to. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Except science now tells us that luck is there whether you acknowledge it or not. And I'm afraid in your case I see the signs of a history of bad luck. Not even a latency so much as a full-blown case going completely ignored for lack of context. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Did he ever
try?'
Mingus shrugged. 'He was like you.'
What's that mean?'
Means he tried.'
Of course. The ring was not a neutral tool. It judged its wearer: Aaron Doily flew drunkenly, and Dylan flew like a coward, only when it didn't matter, at the Windles' pond. So if had attuned to Robert Woolfolk's chaos.
Don't tell me,' said Dylan. 'He flew sideways.'
Mingus left it vague. He'd always made it his habit to protect their honor against one another
Dylan, Arthur, Robert. To say nothing. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I jotted the name down mentally on that tattered notepad I call a memory. The pen skipped. ~ Jonathan Lethem

You can't be deep without a surface ~ Jonathan Lethem

The waiting area was jammed with the sort of egalitarian cross-section only genuine misery can provide: Hispanics and blacks and Russians and various indeterminate, red-eyed teenage girls with children you prayed were siblings; junkie veterans petitioning for painkillers they wouldn't get; ~ Jonathan Lethem

I've always been passionately in love with movies, to such a degree that even as a young person of about nineteen or twenty I thought maybe I would try to become a film director. The reason I didn't do it was because I felt I didn't have the right personality. At that time in my life, I was mortally shy. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time *isn't*. ~ Jonathan Lethem

May one plead, Your Honor, postmodernism as an involuntary condition? ~ Jonathan Lethem

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions. ~ Jonathan Lethem