278 Quotes by Jonathan Lethem

Yet I’m making a book and I’m going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won’t believe in it and it won’t be real to me until there’s a finished book I can hold.

The speaker was stringy and angular, his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, his plaid workman’s shirtsleeves rolled up around his pale biceps. Journalism major, I guessed.

Apologies aren’t something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror.

I was playing it existential, and maybe a bit stupid, but it was the only way I knew how to play it.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction – by skipping the parts that bored me.

I’d have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn’t been able to shift into fiction.

I don’t really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that’s my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.

How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.