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“I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Writing #Bored #Fiction
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“Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Names #Shut Up #Someday
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“What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Boys #Scary #Black
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“I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Moving #World #Want
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“Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Believe #Insomnia #Race
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“Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Writing #Kind #Fantastic
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“I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Cafes #World #Laptops
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“You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Growing Up #Cities #Missing
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“My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Heart #Reality #Mad
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“My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Heart #My Heart #Nostalgic
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“My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Heart #My Heart #Elevators
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“But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Self #Self Pity #Pity
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“Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Couple #People #Guy
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“It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Way #Destination #Bluffs
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“To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Loneliness #Resentment #Companion
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“You can't be deep without a surface”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Surface
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“Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Children #Mean #Judging
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“what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Anxiety #Modernism #Postmodernism
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“There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Halloween #Kids #Light
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“Anyone could see it all coming and no one could possibly stop it and that was the beautiful thing. Friday night was open wide and writ in stone”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Beautiful #Friday #Night
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“I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Crazy #Book #Character
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“I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Art #Kids #Drawing
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“Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature and my love of film.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Thinking #Energy #Gone
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“I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Writing #Space #Long
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“I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Confused #Boundaries #Genre
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“Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Teenage #Adults #Want
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“I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Writing #Order #Paint
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“Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Masters #Plans #Discomfort
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“As a child growing up in pre-gentrification Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, I went everywhere by bicycle. My bike was in many ways the key to my neighborhood, which, at the time, was Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This was in the 60s and 70s, before all the white people and restaurants. I really can't underscore boldly enough the fact that I grew up in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, before it was gentrified. You could get mugged!”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Children #Growing Up #Keys
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“I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.”
-- Jonathan Lethem
#Father #Artist #Parent
