Jonathan Lethem Quotes

I don't want to be an artist that gets stuck doing one thing. I don't want to be an artist who people look back at and say, 'His early work was really great.'

I've done the country, done the pop-rock, done the super-hard electro.

There's an audience out there for all these different types of things. Whether it's comedy, motion-picture drama, family movie or a cool, cutting-edge indie, it's nice to know that I can span all those different genres.

I think it would be very difficult to maintain one kind of art or whatever for your whole life. I think it's unrealistic.

Genre hopping is something I intend to do, and I intend to do it forever and ever because I think genres are boring.

What stirs my passion is making cinema, and that means doing different things, making different types of films.

I'm old-fashioned. I think William Blake and people in the Renaissance people were multi. Look at da Vinci, he was involved in science; and Michelangelo was dabbling in poetry. Both of them were painters and sculptors but they also involved themselves with architecture. I honestly don't know what happened in the '60s and '70s. If you sang rock and roll in America at that time or were involved in expressing yourself through music like that, then many thought you couldn't possibly be an artist. That thinking is archaic.

No one who looks at my paintings can see whether a painting is upside down or not anymore. I've made or developed so many image models that some people have given up trying to keep track of me. But others have only one or two ways of doing things and are successful with that.

I don't want to just be an actor my whole life. I mean I do want to be an actor my whole life but not only an actor, I want to be an artist.

How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene.

In a way, painting is like wine: it is as old, as simple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is a very specific means of expression, with a limited vocabulary, but vast in its expressive potential.

I was sick of fast, aggressive music; I felt like I needed to make a poppy thing. But, right now, I feel like I need to make a Hawkwind/Sabbath record. It gets boring if you just do the same thing all the time.

You just do the best you can. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to get worse the more you do it. It can get better, I think... aspects of it, anyway. I mean, I don't write as much as I used to. But I don't do a lot of things as much as I used to. So that's the natural order of things, too. You're more or less living in the present. You're just trying to get that next song, whatever it is. And not think too much about what happened on the last record, or the record you made 20 years ago, because those are over with. Those are done.

I'm basically in every band I ever was in, and the songs, I still mean them all. I don't take anything back, so I do look after them to some degree. But my main focus is on what I'm doing now.

Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.

We don't talk about tennis. I figure she knows what she's doing. I mean, what am I going to tell her?

The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread.

My dad means a lot to me. He's the one who put a football in my hands.

I'm hearing in youth sports where you're not allowed to post scores of games online; everybody's gotta get a trophy. I mean, that's ridiculous. If you're a winner, you're a winner and you get a trophy. If you got second place, you don't get anything.

You have to really swallow your pride and admit that you want to make a comeback. And that means that you weren't at your best and I feel like I stopped being who I needed to be. When I started making this record "Born Villain", I didn't want to be what I used to be but I certainly didn't want to be what I was at the time. I knew that I was supposed to be something better then what I was. I feel that I am close to being what I'm supposed to be and am enjoying what I'm doing here.

What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.

Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.

To do anything to a high level it has to be total obsession. Ask José Mourinho, he wouldn't know a thing about me, my sport - he knows football, and to get to high levels you have to be insane, nothing else means anything. I respect all forms of movement and lifestyles, but I am in a bubble. I wake up, it is in my head; I go to sleep, it's in my head, 24/7.

Music means freedom to me. But in acting you can pretend to be someone else and I like that.

When you live around a working-class environment, you see what sports means to people. You see that it's the escape over the weekend. you see how they build their lives around it. People sort of want to get away from their lives.