Jonathan Lethem's Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

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

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

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.

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

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 try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

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

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.

In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.

It was good while it was good.

It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.

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.