278 Quotes by Jonathan Lethem

Music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can’t really make it. It’s like a car I can’t drive.

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

When I was a boy I used to love pizza, and whenever my father took me to the pizzeria I’d order two slices. And I’d sit and he’d watch me wolfing down the first slice with my eyes on the second. I wasn’t even tasting that first slice. And one day my father said to me, “Son, you need to learn that while you’re eating the first slice of pizza, eat the first slice. Because right now you’re eating the second slice before you’ve finished the first.

I gained an insight, a purloined-letter kind of thing.

She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek... “Don’t do that”, I said. “You just met me. This is New York.

Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you’re right up against her naked soul.

Destroy the traces. I’d never tried to do that. Instead I’d lived in their midst for thirty years, oblivious, a blind man fancying himself invisible.

I’m not too embarrassed to say I’m the definition of the target audience. This is my generation, the one of exalting music in album form.

I don’t have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I’m doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.