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" The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals. "

Jonathan Lethem

Religion

Parents

Values

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" I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture. "

" Discomfort is very much part of my master plan. "

" I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram. "

" I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts. "

" Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature and my love of film. "

Jonathan Lethem

Energy

Film

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

" I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction. "

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

" I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow. "

Jonathan Lethem

Head

Chicken

" The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white. "

" 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. "

" In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love. "

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

Jonathan Lethem

Fiction

Way

" 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

Expectation

Free

" The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around. "

Jonathan Lethem

Buildings

Memory

" Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Jonathan Lethem

Information

Arts

" I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way. "

" I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy. "

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

" I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid. "

" I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world. "

" When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed. "

" What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark. "

" It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then. "

" I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example. "

Jonathan Lethem

Artist

" 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. "

" The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory. "