Jonathan Lethem Quotes

..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.

I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.

I honestly believe there is absolutely nothing like going to bed with a good #book; or a friend who's #read one.

I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head.

A book is maybe about 350 pages, and the prose allows for readers to get a glimpse into the internal lives of the characters. A screenplay is 120 pages, and it's all dialogue and action. The pacing of films is different, the structure is often different, and the internal lives of the characters must come across through the acting. Movies are just a different experience than reading - so it just depends on what an individual prefers.

Books, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight and smell, in their touch and feel to the questing hand, and in the intellectual music which they sing to the thoughtful brain and loving heart, books are to me the best of all symbols, the realest of all reality.

There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.

I was not scared of anything, when I read my book.

The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better."

One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.

Avid readers are enchanted by meaning, which is available chiefly in books.

There's a different experience when you're reading a book rather than when you're seeing something on screen. When you're seeing a movie or TV show, it's a three-dimensional experience you're in the middle of, but when you're reading something, you're suppling the reality with your imagination.

Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.

The difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity.

A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it.

Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

It felt good to be surrounded by books, by all this solid knowledge, by these objects that could be ripped page by page but couldn't be torn if the pages all held together.

Movies are different from books and you need to be open to go into that difference.

Half my life is in book's written pages. Live and learn from fools and from sages.

The more I write, the more I've come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you're not being asked to imagine more.

Books are like flypaper, memories cling to the printed pages better than anything else.

Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.

A television picture or a movie might be lost forever, but your book is waiting.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.