Jonathan Lethem Quotes

If a scene doesn't work on three levels - it's not advancing the story, the characters, and telling me something new - then put it in the trash.

When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.

A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

I used my daughter's crayons for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle.

A dream inspiring a story is different than placing a description of a dream in a story. When you describe a character's dream, it has to be sharper than reality in some way, and more meaningful. It has to somehow speak to plot, character, and all the rest. If you're writing something fantastical, it can be a really deadly choice because your story already has elements that can seem dreamlike.

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

When you get an idea, so many things come in that one moment. You could write the sound of that idea, or the sound of the room it's in. You could write the clothes the character is wearing, what they're saying, how they move, what they look like. Instead of making up, you're actually catching an idea, for a story, characters, place, and mood - all the stuff that comes.

I personally adore origin stories - they're so intriguing, learning what shaped and formed a character.

Marty [Scorsese] knows that when an improvised moment comes out of a real situation, it's gonna have more life and more going on than anything you can imagine and that's how the character can become the story

Doctor Strange is an origin story so there's a certain room for me improving as well as the character improving.

Kids, if anything, are harder to write for because they are a more discerning audience. They will not stay with you if you go off on a tangent or if you give them extraneous information that doesn't serve the story. You really have to tell a tight story. You have to give them humor and suspense and believable characters. All those things that adults want too, but you have to be really on your game when you're writing for kids.

You have to do three things really well to make a successful film. You have to tell a compelling story that has a story that is unpredictable, that keeps people on the edge of their seat where they can't wait to see what happens next. You then populate that story with really memorable and appealing characters. And then, you put that story and those characters in a believable world, not realistic but believable for the story that you're telling.

By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it - and what other things you don't hear - you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

Novel writing, to me, is all about language: choosing your words, finding the characters within the words and just really agonizing over every word. It's really crafting this whole piece from nothing.

It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done the hard part - made up a story, provided the characters.

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

They also work as half-hours. The stories are all different but include elements of revenge, or the supernatural, or some sort of surprise.

We live in a sea of general ideas, so that's not a novel, since there are so many general ideas. But the moment a particular idea is linked to a character, it's like an engine moves it. Then you have a novel underway.

Also, as an author, character has always been what I'm most interested in - much more so than plot or setting, although those are good things too.

Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.

If you're gonna let the character be the story, you better set a tone that allows the actors to do the best work they can do.

The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary.

Tom [Cruise] is a great producer himself. He's got great sense of story. It's always great to have the perspective of the person who's playing the character in your film.

In essence I'm really a very traditional writer. I subscribe to the notion that, ultimately, characters do drive everything else.