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
heart reality mad
My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.
heart my-heart elevators
My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.
heart path
All paths lead nowhere, choose one with heart,
reading heart artist
Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone.
heart my-heart nostalgic
My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.
influenced information obvious offer seems though tremendous visual
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.
beginning book following move rule simple straight
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.
actual black hole novel third
In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.
emotional thinking want
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.
block thinking essence
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.
unique thinking views
I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts.
song ipods records
I had an all-Fear of Music iPod, just versions of the 11 songs from the record. No other songs allowed.
target-audience generations definitions
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.
writing silence horror
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.