Jonathan Lethem Quotes

Apologies aren't something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror

Journeyman himself had a kind of tone deafness when it came to Eastern stuff, or at least to the Eastern stuff spouted by Westerners who fancied themselves enlightened.

I argue against depth wherever I find it.

"Response to the question by The Atlantic: Who is the Greatest Fictional Character of All Time? "God is the author of all the other characters, and of all the other authors of all the other characters, unless he doesn't exist — and said existence, in its disputation, is one of the greatest ongoing narratives in human storytelling.

A simple, elegant game. Like riding a bicycle, once you’ve learned you can hardly fail to pick it up again, that is unless the brakes are out of order.

We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centrepiece, as incoherent as a been less sentence.

But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or on somebody else’s dime. Nobody loved our sentences as we loved them, and so they congealed or grew sour on our tongues.
We barely glanced at our wall-scribblings for fear of what a few weeks or even hours might expose in our infatuations. Our photocopied fortune slips we’d find in muddy clogs in storm drains, tangled with advertising flyers, unheeded.
Our manuscripts? Those were unspeakable secrets, kept not only from the world but from each other.
My pages were shameful, occluded everywhere with xxxxxx’s of regret. I scurried to read Clea’s manuscript every time she left the apartment but never confessed that I even knew it existed.
Her title was “Those Young Rangers Thought Love Was a Scandal Like a Bald White Head.” Mine was “I Heard the Laughter of the Sidemen from Behind Their Instruments.

Let him get stoned, since everybody must.

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

Each might have been a week except for night’s failure to come and close the deal.

The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism.

Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.

To tugboat was to try Minna's patience. Any time you pushed your luck, said too much, overstayed a welcome, or overestimated the usefulness of a given method or approach, you were guilty of having tugged the boat. Tugboating was most of all a dysfunction of wits and storytellers, and a universal one. Anybody who thought himself funny would likely tug a boat here or there. Knowing when a joke or verbal gambit was right at its limit, quitting before the boat had been tugged, that was art.

The tragedy of being old is you can no longer apply whats taken you so long to learn (Kissing The Beehive)

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