Jonathan Lethem
Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.
I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
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.
Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.
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.
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.
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.
When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.
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.
In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.
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.
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.
I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.
I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.
I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy.
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.
It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.
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 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.
It was good while it was good.
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
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.
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 don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.
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.
My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.
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.
Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.Collection: Names
I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.Collection: Moving
The level at which my OCD enters my writing process isn't that I slap the keyboard - it's more along the lines of a compulsive need to swap syllables around, rework words and sentences - I revise for the pleasure and satisfaction of it, rather than out of a sense of duty.Collection: Writing
All paths lead nowhere; choose one with heart...Collection: Heart
When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.Collection: People
Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.Collection: Couple
There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.Collection: Body
Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.Collection: Art
Life is fundamentally up for grabsCollection: Life Is
There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.Collection: Percentages
I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.Collection: Writing
Insomnia 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.Collection: Believe
Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Art
I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.Collection: Art
Music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can't really make it. It's like a car I can't drive.Collection: Moving
I never have been a musician; I'm not actually capable. Because I can't even pretend to acquire the gift, all of my first feelings about art are still attached to music. I look at it yearningly, I look at it wonderingly. I behold it from afar, as something unattainable, something outside of myself, from which I can take nourishment, but I can't domesticate and master.Collection: Art
I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.Collection: Neat And Tidy
Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.Collection: Real