Jonathan Lethem Quotes

American novelist, essayist, short story writer, Roy E. Disney Chair in Creative Writing, Pomona College

Jonathan Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.

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Pen Names: Harry Conklin

Alternative Names: Jonathan Allen Lethem

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...Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter?

Mingus Rude, Arthur Lomb, Gabriel Stern and Tim Vandertooth, even Aaron K. Doily: Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another. He took it in stride by now.

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.

Baader-Meinhof Gruppe, they are called also.” “Yes.

He didn't hide his teeth, which were bright yellow, like the van we'd unloaded.

The morning’s light danced on the spine of the new bridge, which towered like the guts of a cosmic piano. The same light that agitated the picture windows of the gaudy homes tumbled so recklessly into the seams of the Oakland hills.

I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.

The way to make a bundle in architecture right now was to devise new ways for people to pretend to gather while actually keeping their distance.

I’d joined the ever-growing category of things that look better when you leave the light off.

on the one hand there’s mansplaining, and on the other, there’s the sound of a woman quoting the mansplaining to another woman.

I'm always serious. That's the tragedy of my life.

We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.

My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.

On Telegraph, she stopped him in front of Walgreens, put the sack into his hands, a finger to her lips. “I’ll come back.” He was left to contemplate the sidewalk, full of listless earring vendors ready with their piercing guns.

My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.