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All 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.
Jonathan Lethem
63% of people like this quote
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
Jonathan Lethem
63% of people like this quote
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.
Jonathan Lethem
60% of people like this quote
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.
Jonathan Lethem
59% of people like this quote
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
Jonathan Lethem
55% of people like this quote
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.
Jonathan Lethem
55% of people like this quote
In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.
Jonathan Lethem
55% of people like this quote
Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.
Jonathan Lethem
54% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this quote
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.
Jonathan Lethem
53% of people like this quote
I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.
Jonathan Lethem
53% of people like this quote
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
53% of people like this quote
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
52% of people like this quote
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