Quotes from Jonathan Lethem

Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut?

The house on The Crescent, stepped into the hillside, had no face. In

The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions.

As Bruno neared, Stolarsky stepped from behind the door. His feet and legs were bare. He held a pistol, loosely, and wore nothing but a thin T-shirt. The darkness beneath its hem revealed as a scribble of genitals and hair, his penis like a second sarcastic nose.

Yeah, maybe you look a little less familiar yourself.

Cocaine Suppe Mit Tittenschnakken

A simple, elegant game. Like riding a bicycle, once you've learned you can hardly fail to pick it up again, that is unless the brakes are out of order.

Then again, the story does involve a missing person, and it could well be me. Or you, or practically anybody. As he said to me once, who's not missing?

Flirtation, so effortlessly accomplished. Mention of the train had done it. Train unspecified; they both knew which. They'd ridden together and now shared the ferry, and though a thousand identical to her might have strolled past his Charlottenburg café window in two weeks, the shared destination worked its paltry magic. And both tall. This little was enough to excuse lust as destiny.

That's when it comes, the urge to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It's an itch at first. Inconsequential. But that itch is soon a torrent behind a straining damn. Noah's flood. That itch is my whole life. Here is comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark. Eat me! I scream.

Open duh computer." Germans ought to farm out all positions of petty authority. The accent remained too full of implication.

Carlotta hovered over us as we devoured her meatballs, running her floury fingers over the backs of our chairs, then gently touching our heads, the napes of our necks. We pretended not to notice, ashamed in front of one another and ourselves to show that we drank in her nurturance as eagerly as her meat sauce.

Relax,' she said. 'There's nothing wrong with a slow, awkward beginning. The text for the whole relationship, the sustaining mythos, is built in the first few encounters. The whirl of emotions, the push and pull. So the more of this kind of material we generate, the better.

Let him get stoned, since everybody must.

Response to the question by The Atlantic: Who is the Greatest Fictional Character of All Time? God is the author of all the other characters, and of all the other authors of all the other characters, unless he doesn't exist--and said existence, in its disputation, is one of the greatest ongoing narratives in human storytelling.

blow the sixty bucks on a movie on Shattuck, on a bucket of fake-buttered popcorn and a shoe-box-size carton of Whoppers or Junior Mints. Cradling the bucket or carton he'd slip into the darkness, washed over by the phantasms of some sex comedy played by American actors a quarter-century younger than himself, who were meant to be taken for adults. This would make it permissible to die. Desirable, even.

The Hippie Parents weren't for all their distraction and funk, for their love triangles and LPs and antiwar demonstrations, illiterates...You'd find the books in the downstairs bathroom, or on their bedside tables, or maybe see them unwrapped at holidays as gifts, a cherished revelation passed from one to another, shared like a joint...

To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interweave...

For Cicero, censure of a blatant racist or homophobe was not only useless but fatally boring. The power residing in such accusations was best wielded at random, against the most avowedly sympathetic and correct colleague or student. Cicero routinely dropped a casual "But of course, you realize you're a racist" into friendly interactions. The less evidence on hand, the more destabilizing the result.

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.

I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.

Good films demand to be looked at several times in order to be observed completely.

As much as I care about historical context - I'm very eager to read a really great historical account.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.