Lethem Quotes & Sayings

Mrs. Neverbody's Recipe for Making Crocodile Tears To a slice of hanky-panky Add some artificial cranky. Moisten well with canned boo-hoo. Flavor with a spoof or two. Drip this slowly - as it falls Roll it into little bawls. If you're careful, while they're cooling You can spread on only-fooling. (This recipe is not worthwhile Unless you are a crocodile.) — Jonathan Lethem

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

I raised that kid like I was running an egg-and-spoon race through a minefield, and he was the egg. — Jonathan Lethem

You can't be deep without a surface — 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

Prince's music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger. — Jonathan Lethem

I'd underestimated him. I assumed anyone who started out gut-punching you in an elevator couldn't have all that much else in his arsenal. For instance, I had no idea he could smile, let alone at such an inappropriate time. — Jonathan Lethem

All paths lead nowhere, choose one with heart, — Jonathan Lethem

On Telegraph, she stopped him in front of Walgreens, put the sack into his hands, a finger to her lips. "I'll come back." He was left to contemplate the sidewalk, full of listless earring vendors ready with their piercing guns. — 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

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

I was famously in love with a woman who had no time to spare, not even a breath, for she dwelled in a place beyond time or the reach of anyone's Rolodex, her every breath measured out of pressurized tanks. — 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

I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different. — Jonathan Lethem

The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like - or what some artist has decided the character really looks like - because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences. — 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

I try to write every day. I don't beat myself up about word counts, or how many hours are ticking by on the clock before I'm allowed to go and do something else. I just try to keep a hand in and work every single day, even if there are other demands or I'm on a book tour or have the flu or something, because then I keep my unconscious engaged with the book. Then I'm always a little bit writing, no matter what else I'm doing. — Jonathan Lethem

... Carlotta hovered over us as we devoured her meatballs, running her floury fingers over the backs of our chairs, then gently touching our heads, the napes of our necks. We pretended not to notice, ashamed in front of one another and ourselves to show that we drank in her nurturance as eagerly as her meat sauce. — Jonathan Lethem

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

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. — Jonathan Lethem

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. — Jonathan Lethem

I suppose in a way most of my characters are non-consumers, not terribly interested in all the little baubles and artifacts of contemporary life. — Jonathan Lethem

Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain
same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer. — Jonathan Lethem

It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area. — Jonathan Lethem

The revving heart of my hopefulness, kicked into gear anew, is the most precious thing about me, I refuse to vilify it. — 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. — Jonathan Lethem

When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had. — 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

Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his. — 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

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. — 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. — 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

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

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan ... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self. — 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. — Jonathan Lethem

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

I'd forgotten my identity as the world's most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead. — Jonathan Lethem

They were drones, men costumed in independent thought who'd become slaves of party groupspeak. (p. 4) — 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

I'd never pondered the bourgeois implications of an earplug. — Jonathan Lethem

His ironies were ghoulish now. — Jonathan Lethem

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

Chaos didn't know what this meant. He kept feeling like somehow, intending to travel across land, he'd traveled through time instead. — Jonathan Lethem

I'm forever writing around a void - I guess I don't have to explain to you why that is. — 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

Mingus Rude, Arthur Lomb, Gabriel Stern and Tim Vandertooth, even Aaron K. Doily: Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another. He took it in stride by now. — Jonathan Lethem

Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle. — Jonathan Lethem

When I was a boy I used to love pizza, and whenever my father took me to the pizzeria I'd order two slices. And I'd sit and he'd watch me wolfing down the first slice with my eyes on the second. I wasn't even tasting that first slice. And one day my father said to me, Son, you need to learn that while you're eating the first slice of pizza, eat the first slice. Because right now you're eating the second slice before you've finished the first. — 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

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

Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had ben taken from me, stripped off like clothes I'd only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious. — 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

Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' is no movie-of-the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Maybe his Tourette's is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick with depth, with soul. — Gary Krist

When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved. — 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

You don't have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning. — Jonathan Lethem

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. — 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 house on The Crescent, stepped into the hillside, had no face. In — Jonathan Lethem

Baader-Meinhof Gruppe, they are called also." "Yes. — 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

Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance for that you're in great trouble. If you want to call it a writer's block ... that doesn't seem a very useful name for that kind of abiding that I think is the essence of the work. — 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

Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can't have. And then about what you receive and misuse. — Jonathan Lethem

The lowliest European functionary - a border inspector, say - dressed immaculately, and furnished even a cubicle to lend an impression of respectability. A truly wealthy man, like Stolarsky, pronounced his status in paneling, burnished wood, fountain pens, leather volumes. Bruno banished the despondent thought; this baleful room was Europe's nullification. "What's the matter, I trample on your delicate sensibilities? — 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. — Jonathan Lethem

I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. And scissors - that's beyond the pale. — Jonathan Lethem

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways. — Jonathan Lethem

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time. — Jonathan Lethem

I'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world. — 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

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

My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign. — Jonathan Lethem

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's
the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance
as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off. — 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

I'm always serious. That's the tragedy of my life. — Jonathan Lethem

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

But the stories you told yourself
which you pretended to recall as if they'd happened every afternoon of an infinite summer
were really a pocketful of days distorted into legend, another jailhouse exaggeration, like the dimensions of those ballpoint-crosshatched tits or of the purported mountains of blow you once used to enjoy, or how you'd bellowed an avenger's roar when you squeezed the trigger of a pistol you'd actually brandished in self-pissing terror. How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned a few afternoons long, in the end. — Jonathan Lethem

Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other. — Jonathan Lethem

Memory is a rehearsal for a show that never goes on. — Jonathan Lethem

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary? — Jonathan Lethem

Sleepwalkers, leave other sleepwalkers alone! — 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. — Jonathan Lethem

When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode. I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure. — Jonathan Lethem

Hospital" turned out to represent a punctuated tedium, the recurrence of blood pressure and temperature checks, the placement and emptying of bedpans and painful switching of IV lines from the crook of one elbow to the other, and the switching of nurses as day and night were destroyed and replaced with tripartite shifts. — Jonathan Lethem

Good films demand to be looked at several times in order to be observed completely. — 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

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language. — Jonathan Lethem

Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man. — 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 don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving. — Jonathan Lethem

I met someone who lives in an elevator. — 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. — Jonathan Lethem

Astrology fell into the class of a fake lie ... and not worth the efforts of the debunking engine Cicero had been born with in place of a brain. Cicero's capacities were reserved for lies that mattered. Ideology, though that word was yet unknown to him: the veil of sustaining fiction that drove the world, what people needed to believe. This, Cicero wished to unmask and unmake, decry and destroy. (p. 65) — 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

The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk. — 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

Picture us, five floating nudists in oxygen masks, ragged with fatigue and degrees of schock, squeezing the last beads of antifreeze from our hair. — Jonathan Lethem

It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed. — Jonathan Lethem