Quotes from Jonathan Lethem

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

Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.

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

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

Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car.

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.

I jotted the name down mentally on that tattered notepad I call a memory. The pen skipped.

Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain---same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer.

A shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I'd overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker.

Nobody said anything while I opened the bag and took out the egg salad sandwich. It was one of those funny moments when a bit of normal human activity embarrasses everybody out of their bluster and hostility, and roles are momentarily laid aside.

I'm tightly wound. I'm a loose cannon. Both - I'm a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose.

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.

The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.

Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.

I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over.

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.

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.

Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature, and my love of film...

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

I'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again... The energy comes from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there.

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

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