Jonathan Lethem Quotes

If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.

I think I have minor obsessive compulsive disorder. Everything has to be tidy and just right.

I work very hard, you know, but I don't think that I'm working, because what I do pleases me so much. I write about certain things because certain things happen to me.

Oh, I'm completely OCD about neatness.

I'm pretty OCD. I like to fine-tune every single detail. I think that's a habit built maybe from me being OCD.

When you're writing, it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea.

I'm kind of OCD.

I have really bad anxiety and OCD. I get afraid of everyone I know dying.

I'm not really worried about writer's block.

I think one of the things that is essential for happiness in life, or at least for non-sadness, is producing something. I guess that's why I spend so much time and agony writing books. But working on carpentry is sort of like all the pleasure with none of the agony.

I lived with a guy who had OCD and I used to put Rice Krispies in his slippers before I went out. He went mental, but not before he counted them all.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.

We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.

Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write; Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.

I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing - I cannot tell you how much. The moment I am at the end of one project I have the idea that I didn't really succeed in telling what I wanted to tell, that I need a new project - it's an absolute nightmare. But my whole economy of writing is in fact based on an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing.

Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over.

To write is human, to edit is divine.

There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

I don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together.

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

I can’t write five words but that I change seven.

If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving.

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.