Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Allen Lethemis an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth19 February 1964
CountryUnited States of America
careers want lucky
What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
quarantine taste boundaries
I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.
masters discomfort plans
Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.
father artist parent
I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.
nerd biting sound
I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.
addiction trying subculture
I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
numbers quality pages
I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.
philosophical interesting people
I'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.
photography dog choices
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.
paper environment proof
I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.
order demand film
Good films demand to be looked at several times in order to be observed completely.
target-audience generations definitions
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.
block thinking essence
Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance for that you're in great trouble. If you want to call it a writer's block... that doesn't seem a very useful name for that kind of abiding that I think is the essence of the work.
unique thinking views
I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts.