Jonathan Lethem Quotes

I think stories can grow out of the visual. It can be an engine for literacy.

I was really into writing short fiction and also photography when I was a kid.

I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'

For English assignments I was constantly coming up with these strange adventure stories... But I actually wanted to be an artist, or maybe work in the comic book industry.

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.

I'm a writer. An amateur photographer. An actor.

I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist.

I started out doing music videos and photography, and I always loved writing.

Throughout my life I have taken detours in acting and writing, but art remains my abiding passion.

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I don't wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.

Fiction writing is just an excuse to go discover interesting things.

I've always considered myself a poet in everything that I do, whether it's photography or movie-making.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

When I was writing songs, I always thought I'd make more of a career out of the drawings, the comics even more than the music.

I often use hypothetical situations to generate information and imagery for paintings and to create a fictional space where a subject can be put into play.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

For most of my career I illustrated books for other people.

Everybody has ideas. The vital question is, what do you do with them? My rock musician sons shape their ideas into music. My sister takes her ideas and fashions them into poems. My brother uses his ideas to help him understand science. I take my ideas and turn them into stories.

Before that I wanted to be a magazine illustrator - I probably would have painted Gothic scenes.

I write novels and other things.

I write all the time. I do artwork that's part of a diary, and I write short stories to go with them pretty much every day.

I definitely used to write a lot at school. Comic poetry and drawings about people.

I like to read and dream and create music that is based on the imagery of text. If you have the combination of a great book and a great filmmaker, what could be better for the composer?