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
reading may matter
No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.
reading writing flow
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.
reading people musical
Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information - facts, more than just the surfaces of things.
art book reading
I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.
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.
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.