Jonathan Lethem Quotations

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.

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.

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.

I had an all-Fear of Music iPod, just versions of the 11 songs from the record. No other songs allowed.

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.

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.

I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.

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

A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.