Quotes by Jonathan Lethem

About Jonathan Lethem:

Jonathan Allen Lethem is 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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

By trying to export myself into a place that didn't fully exist I asked works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. In fact, I believe they are, and do. My life is dedicated to that belief. Bu...

Jonathan Lethem

You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma. (p. 5)

Jonathan Lethem

(I)t was by Cicero's attainments that that he'd gained special witness to the liberals' adjustment to a brush with equality.

Jonathan Lethem

In the sea of words, the is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.

Jonathan Lethem

There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.

Jonathan Lethem

If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, i...

Jonathan Lethem

Did he ever--try?' Mingus shrugged. 'He was like you.' What's that mean?' Means he tried.' Of course. The ring was not a neutral tool. It judged its wearer: Aaron Doily flew drunkenly, and Dylan flew like a coward, only when it didn't matter, at the ...

Jonathan Lethem

The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, i...

Jonathan Lethem

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.

Jonathan Lethem

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

Jonathan Lethem

Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You'd pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit. The ones who couldn't read sti...

Jonathan Lethem

It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

Jonathan Lethem

Eighth grade's a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of thei...

Jonathan Lethem

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.

Jonathan Lethem

How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a ...

Jonathan Lethem

The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk.

Jonathan Lethem

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.

Jonathan Lethem

As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another.

Jonathan Lethem

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.

Jonathan Lethem

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, bel...

Jonathan Lethem

Author Bio

  • NameJonathan Lethem
  • DescriptionNovelist, essayist, short story writer
  • AliasesJonathan Allen Lethem
  • BornFebruary 19, 1964
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • WorksMotherless Brooklyn; The Fortress Of Solitude
  • AwardsLocus Award; National Book Critics Circle Award; World Fantasy Award