Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Allen Lethemis an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth19 February 1964
CountryUnited States of America
elevators mets
I met someone who lives in an elevator.
new-york writing energy
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.
real book believe
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.
laptops cafes world
I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.
writing kind fantastic
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
believe insomnia race
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.
art different firm
I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.
halloween kids sky
There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.
heart my-heart nostalgic
My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.
moving world want
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.
art order focus
Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.
boys scary black
What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
names shut-up someday
Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
writing bored way
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.