Quotes from Jonathan Lethem

Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.

No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.

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.

It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.