Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book. - Jonathan Lethem

"When I was a boy I used to love pizza, and whenever my father took me to the pizzeria I'd order two slices. And I'd sit and he'd watch me wolfing down the first slice with my eyes on the second. I wasn't even tasting that first slice. And one day my father said to me, "Son, you need to learn that while you're eating the first slice of pizza, eat the first slice. Because right now you're eating the second slice before you've finished the first.

Just handling this ocean of different books — new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten — it was literature as this giant mosaic of texts and experiments and attitudes. I think it’s just very liberating to break out of a great man’s theory of history.

I guess I’ve always liked working from that sense of — what would you call it? — license that the margins permit. I always just visualize myself writing books that were meant one day to be dusty, forgotten volumes being encountered by intrepid browsers in a used bookstore. It was a much less freighted way to think about trying to enter the conversation than to imagine I had to write The Great Gatsby.

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