278 Quotes by Jonathan Lethem

The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.

Every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It's impossible.

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.

Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.

What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos.

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

I believe that written stories will continue to survive because they answer an essential human need. I think movies might disappear before the novel disappears, because the novel is really one of the only places in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.

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