Jonathan Lethem Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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I have to keep reminding myself: If you give your life to God, he doesn't promise you happiness and that everything will go well. But he does promise you peace. You can have peace and joy, even in bad circumstances.
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We do high heels, and people know us for that, but the idea of wearing a flat from day to night feels special.
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I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.
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I don't get star-struck at all.
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The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in France got very angry.
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No man can be ideally successful until he has found his place. Like a locomotive he is strong on the track, but weak anywhere else.
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The trade magazine and all was banned in my house. The first time I read a film magazine was when I was 18.
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I hate to witness animals in captivity - or see circus elephants paraded down the streets. When animals are caged, it's a loss of what they are.
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The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
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You can really taste the difference between a shop-bought and a good homemade mayo.
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I have a condition called Aspergers Syndrome, which is like a mild form of autism It means I don't interact properly in certain social situations.
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I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order.
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In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.
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The main reason I backed DeepMind was strategic: I see my role as bridging the AI research and AI safety communities.
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I like Disney Channel a lot, and I also like to watch 'Full House.'
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I don't have time to listen to anybody's music. I'm making it, you know.
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National partition is a sorrow that touches all Koreans, but for me it is brought to the fore by unimaginable personal suffering.
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Even before I competed in the Olympics, I always wanted to write a book.
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My sport taught me what I could do with my talents, whether in the rink or in the rest of my life.
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Margot Hentoff thinks - first of all, she - this I hear from a lot of people beside her. She thinks that men have no business getting into this argument at all unless they're going to be pro-choice. But it turns out that a fair number of fetuses are male, and besides that, we are all one part of humankind, it seems to me.
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Ghosts cannot be put on the witness stand, or have their fingerprints taken. They are completely proof against proof.
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I've heard this before from people: early 20s kind of screws with your head a little bit because you're transitioning into adulthood and actually becoming an adult with responsibilities and paying bills. So all of a sudden, it's like you're responsible now.
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My dad was born in Chicago in 1908... his parents came from Russia. They settled in Chicago, where they lived in a little tiny grocery store with eight or nine children - in the backroom all together - and my grandmother got the idea to go into the movie business.
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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.
