278 Quotes by Jonathan Lethem

How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?

The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.

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

Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.

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.

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

Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.

You can't be deep without a surface

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.