Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. Jonathan Lethem More Quotes by Jonathan Lethem More Quotes From Jonathan Lethem Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his. Jonathan Lethem guy couple people The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like - or what some artist has decided the character really looks like - because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences. Jonathan Lethem hate character book Music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can't really make it. It's like a car I can't drive. Jonathan Lethem car sky moving My writing life is pretty simple - I try to work every day, almost always in the mornings - and I can only write fiction effectively for about three or at the most four hours. No big mysteries, I just sit down and try to advance the cause a little bit every day. Jonathan Lethem simple writing morning Artists freeze themselves into these weird postures that are meant to be impressive and involving, then they fling them out into the world like Polaroids, and then they move on. And I'm stuck in this intense relationship to the Polaroid. Jonathan Lethem artist world moving As much as I care about historical context - I'm very eager to read a really great historical account. Jonathan Lethem really-great care historical 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 ocd pleasure writing I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems. Jonathan Lethem hate feelings writing I've discovered that like every writer, I'm helpless MYSELF - and that means I find myself unconsciously or semi-consciously repeating motifs and themes and even using certain words or images recurrently in my work, no matter how much I think I'm starting fresh. But I've always admired artists who made a specific sport of trying to visit different kinds of genres or mediums or modes - not just 'western' or 'detective', but comedy/tragedy, epic and miniature, traditional/experimental. Jonathan Lethem epic sports mean 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 psychology writing character 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. Jonathan Lethem emotional want thinking 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 horror silence writing 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. Jonathan Lethem target-audience generations albums I had an all-Fear of Music iPod, just versions of the 11 songs from the record. No other songs allowed. Jonathan Lethem ipods records song When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had. Jonathan Lethem rolling crazy character For me, music is sort of the art that I can't incorporate into my person the way I want to. Jonathan Lethem want way art Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible. Jonathan Lethem kind impossible book 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 language writing 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. Jonathan Lethem emotional dream thinking 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. Jonathan Lethem photography choices dog
