I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
Jonathan LethemRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The author expresses gratitude for having a unique career that allows him to avoid repetition in his writing.
In this quote, Jonathan Lethem reflects on the fortunate aspect of his writing career, highlighting that he has managed to maintain originality and avoid redundancy in his work. He views this ability to continually explore new ideas and styles as his defining characteristic, which brings a sense of achievement and joy to his creative process.
Themes
CreativityOriginalityWritingArtCareer
In practice
Example use cases
In a writing workshop where participants share their unique styles and methods.
More from Jonathan Lethem
All quotes βInsomnia 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 LethemRead
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.
Jonathan LethemRead
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.
Jonathan LethemRead
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
Jonathan LethemRead
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.
Jonathan LethemRead
Similar quotes
It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.
David HockneyRead
People sometimes forget all the films that we've done. They remember the likes of 'Malcolm X' and 'Do the Right Thing.' But I've been working since 1986. From the beginning, I was determined to not just be a flash in the pan. I've got to keep up with Woody Allen. He's lapping me.
Spike LeeRead
See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of.
David LynchRead
Photography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you're alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there's everything, next moment it's gone. Photography is very philosophical.
Joel MeyerowitzRead
Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.
Lev GrossmanRead
I have always wished I could learn to be a potter. I love collecting ceramics; it would be so fulfilling to create something lovely.
Julie AndrewsRead