278 Quotes by Jonathan Lethem

I am relaxed. It’s just buried under layers of incredulity and panic. But underneath those I’m very relaxed.

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.

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

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.

I’m a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.

I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It’s all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.

Once you fall into habits, I think, you’re dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you’ve done in the past.

Like other names I censored lately, this was a vote against invoking monsters, against etching their reality into the air.

He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing – so it was my duty to loathe him instead.