278 Quotes by Jonathan Lethem

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.

I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction-I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow, I keep myself sane.

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.

In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.

I'm not planning what I listen to, except when I think the music can guide me to some emotional place I want to be reminded of.

You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.

Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance for that you're in great trouble. If you want to call it a writer's block... that doesn't seem a very useful name for that kind of abiding that I think is the essence of the work.

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts.