278 Quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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

I don’t paint anymore. I haven’t since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.

Once I had it free, I gobbled the sandwich like a nature-film otter cracking an oyster on its stomach: knees up in the wiring under the dashboard, my elbows jammed against the steering wheel, my chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth.

This kiss would be with me, invisible badge or scar, when I went back to the apartment.

Life is fundamentally up for grabs.

I’d forgotten my identity as the world’s most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead.

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.

As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel – something that I could never have written myself – I’m still looking at it a little bit like a technician.

Reading and writing are the same thing; it’s just one’s the more active and the other’s the more passive. They flow into each other.