Jonathan Lethem Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

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

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Bored, Fiction

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

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Kind, Fantastic

• It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Expectations, Want

• I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Skulls, Bears

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

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Interesting, Different

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Art, Writing, Listening

  "Music, Influence, and "Deeply Unnecessary" Art". Interview with Ben Arthur, logger.believermag.com. March 17, 2015.

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

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Order, Paint

  "‘No, I don’t paint anymore’ – Bookmunch Classic Interview: Jonathan Lethem". Interview with Peter Wild, bookmunch.wordpress.com. October 31, 2013.

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Communication, Writing, Language

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Littles, Esoteric

  "Music, Influence, and "Deeply Unnecessary" Art". Interview with Ben Arthur, logger.believermag.com. March 17, 2015.

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Space, Long

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

  Jonathan Lethem

  Book, Writing, Years

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Song, Writing, Century

  "Music, Influence, and "Deeply Unnecessary" Art". Interview with Ben Arthur, logger.believermag.com. March 17, 2015.

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Moving, Book, Writing

  "Talk time: Jonathan Lethem". Interview with Hamish Mackintosh, www.theguardian.com. January 28, 2004.

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Beautiful, Writing, Luxury

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Silence, Horror

  "Fear of Music". Interview with Jayson Greene, pitchfork.com. May 29, 2012.

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  New York, Writing, Energy

  "Straight outta Brooklyn". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. December 13, 2003.

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Reading, Writing, Flow

  Source: www.believermag.com

• I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Character, Psychology

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Mind, Body

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Hate, Book, Writing

  Interview with Peter Andrey Smith, www.believermag.com. May 2012.

• I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Hate, Writing, Feelings

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Discipline, Fields

  FaceBook post by Jonathan Lethem from Aug 18, 2014

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Effort, Want

  Source: www.believermag.com

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

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Sometimes, Screwed Up

  Interview with Max Miller, bigthink.com. September 25, 2010.

• 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.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Ocd, Pleasure

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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