Jonathan Lethem Quotes

I always loved English because whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we think we are. English is much more a story of who we really are.

I don't know that movies are important. But I know that stories are important. Movies may disappear. They've only been around, for God's sake, for the last hundred years... I think that it's the need to tell stories, and that people need to be told stories. It's the old sitting around the fire, you know.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches — nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

I don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.

I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all.

It's hard to tell what people will do with the word and how they'll be circulating it but I think the storytellers and the stories themselves will always be there.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

I like writing historical fiction.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

The richest most meaningful stories are found in small places: made, carried, crafted, told, and retold by apparently unimportant people.

You need a good James Clavell novel, I think, to make a good miniseries.

Human beings need stories, and we're looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it's television, whether it's comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.

A well-written novel, the most immersive of all forms of storytelling, should command your full attention and belief.

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

All the great history has been written with passion …. Fiction is history from below.

Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human.

There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can't forget, you embroider... The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie.

A novel is not a rant.

I like to read and watch a lot of movies.