Jonathan Lethem Quotes
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I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.
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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.
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Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It was good while it was good.
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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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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.
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Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.
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I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.
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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.
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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.
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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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Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
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I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
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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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I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.