Jonathan Lethem quotes

Jonathan Lethem is an American writer acclaimed for his work in fiction, essays, and criticism. His novels, such as "Motherless Brooklyn" and "The Fortress of Solitude," blend genres like detective fiction, science fiction, and literary realism. He is recognized for his inventive storytelling and exploration of themes like identity, culture, and memory. Here are 34 of his quotes:

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan. (Jonathan Lethem)
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit. View quote
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. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
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... View quote
Jonathan Lethem
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary? View quote
Jonathan Lethem
As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another. (Jonathan Lethem)
You can't be deep without a surface. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
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. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
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. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
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. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
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. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
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. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
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. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
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. (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. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
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. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
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. View quote
Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem - Image
Photo: Wikimedia commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Occupation: American Writer
Born: February 19, 1964
Quotes count: 34