Explore Quotes by Jonathan Lethem

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

I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen.

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

...Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter?

Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.

My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.

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.

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.

To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.

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

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.

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

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.

You can't be deep without a surface

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?