List of Jonathan Lethem Quotes

My Writing Life Is Pretty Simple - I Try To Work Every Day, Almost Always In The Mornings - And I Can Only Write Fiction Effectively For About Three Or At The Most Four Hours. No Big Mysteries, I Just Sit Down And Try To Advance The Cause A Little Bit Every Day.

The Less You Offer, The More Readers Are Forced To Bring The World To Life With Their Own Visual Imaginings. I Personally Hate An Illustration Of A Character On A Jacket Of A Book. I Never Want To Have Someone Show Me What The Character Really Looks Like - Or What Some Artist Has Decided The Character Really Looks Like - Because It Always Looks Wrong To Me. I Realize That I Prefer To Kind Of Meet The Text Halfway And Offer A Lot Of Visual Collaborations From My Own Imaginative Response To The Sentences.

For Me, Music Is Sort Of The Art That I Can't Incorporate Into My Person The Way I Want To.

Being Blocked, Being Uncertain, Sitting There Not Knowing, Waiting, Abiding With It: This Is The Work. If You Don't Have The Tolerance For That You're In Great Trouble. If You Want To Call It A Writer's Block... That Doesn't Seem A Very Useful Name For That Kind Of Abiding That I Think Is The Essence Of The Work.

I Don't Write About Anything I Don't Love Even If That Love Sometimes Gets All Screwed Up And Tormented.

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.

Yes! I'm The Slowest Comic-book Writer On Earth.

I'm Not Too Embarrassed To Say I'm The Definition Of The Target Audience. This Is My Generation, The One Of Exalting Music In Album Form.

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.

I Have A Horror Of Silence While I'm Writing. It's Like The Universe Is Howling At Me If I Don't Have It.

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.

I Hate Feeling Too Complacent When I Write. I Like To Be Solving New Problems.