Jonathan Lethem Quotes

Writing gave me a life.

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

Writing is basically a job for people who like punching themselves in the face, I’m pretty sure.

Most things I go through I have to write about.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I write because I don't know how to ask my questions any other way.

I struggled for a long time to get anything published.

I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve; I write about them.

For me, writing is just processing.

Why do I write? From selfishness. Because this state of liquefied, complex concentration, however faintly and dimly I'm able to perceive it, is the greatest pleasure I know.

I do actually enjoy the process of putting my thoughts down on paper and having people actually read them.

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

Try to think of writing as a gift - more complexly put: it is the curse and the cure.

When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

I don't keep a journal anymore. I did when I was a teenager, but now because I write about it all in my songs, that's what I'm really doing.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence - as it saves most writers who live in 'interesting' oppressive times and are not afflicted by personal immunity.

The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.

Writing is a holy chore.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

The need to express one's self in writing springs from a maladjustment of life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action.

I tried to find a way out in many ways, but it all caught up with me. Once I realised I could sing and write songs, it was just so much easier to do than anything else!

I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it.