Quotes from Jonathan Lethem

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.

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

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

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

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.

Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can't have. And then about what you receive and misuse.

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.

For me, music is sort of the art that I can't incorporate into my person the way I want to.

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

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

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.

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.

What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos.

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.

I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.

I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

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

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.

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.

I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.