Explore Quotes by Jonathan Lethem

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.

The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism.

You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory.

Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.

The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.

Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.

I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.

It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.

The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.

Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.

All paths lead nowhere; choose one with heart...

I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.

Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.

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

How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.