278 Quotes by Jonathan Lethem

I don’t know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about their work. It’s something I find very difficult. And yet, one does have some sense of responsibility towards one’s publishers, to the people trying to sell the book.

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.

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.

Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don’t understand prose. They’re so used to reading journalism – clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information – facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

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.

I have a horror of silence while I’m writing. It’s like the universe is howling at me if I don’t have it.

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.

Guilt wants to cover all the bases, be everywhere at once, reach into the past to tweak, neaten and repair. Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows uselessly, inelegantly from one helpless human to another, contemptuous of perimeters, doomed to be mistaken or refused on delivery.

With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you’re on page 300. You can’t do that with film. It just charges ahead.