Jonathan Lethem Writing Quotations

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

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.

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.

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 hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. And scissors - that's beyond the pale.

Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.

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 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.

You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.

I try to write every day. I don't beat myself up about word counts, or how many hours are ticking by on the clock before I'm allowed to go and do something else. I just try to keep a hand in and work every single day, even if there are other demands or I'm on a book tour or have the flu or something, because then I keep my unconscious engaged with the book. Then I'm always a little bit writing, no matter what else I'm doing.

When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode. I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure.

As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel - something that I could never have written myself - I'm still looking at it a little bit like a technician.

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.

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.

I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.

The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.

Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.

So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

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.