Jonathan Lethem Quotes

My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.

You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

Tourette’s is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain—same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you’ve ever been it you know the answer.

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.

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I’ve got Tourette’s. My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone.

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.

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

I’ve always been passionately in love with movies, to such a degree that even as a young person of about nineteen or twenty I thought maybe I would try to become a film director. The reason I didn’t do it was because I felt I didn’t have the right personality. At that time in my life, I was mortally shy.

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 whim. So why think of it at all?

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

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog – I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.