Jonathan Lethem Quotes

No matter how well a person writes, a successful book is a team effort involving many, many people.

As an author on a corporate press, you have a lot less control over the finished product. I figure if I spend a couple years writing something, I want to be able to decide what the cover looks like and how it's going to be presented.

I very much love a physical book myself. I think people who have had this experience of also seeing a book come together, from sitting down and writing the first word, to holding the binding in your hand, we have a deeper sentimental attachment to it than others might.

I don't have a publisher yet, so I'm not in the process of that next stage and I don't know what that's going to look like. So I feel like I finished stage one [with my book].

Making books is hard work. Some books are, of course, more demanding than others.

It generally takes me about nine months from the point the book is conceived to the point my editor sends it off to be typeset.

All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises.

There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.

The illustrators work so much harder on the books than the writers do. I mean, that's so much work doing what they do, and it's terrible for them.

For an author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written.

When you get the ideas, that's a thrill; when you're writing the book and it's corning out well, that's a thrill; when you finish it and other people read it, that's a thrill. There are going to be reviews, of course; not everyone's going to love it. You feel sort of naked and vulnerable in a way. That's just a minor part of the process, really. If you can't take that part, you shouldn't be in the business. But there are so many joys to writing.

Whatever a writer gets paid for his book, it's never enough. I think that's true. It's hard work. But in the end, you wrote a book. It's something real and tangible that sits on a shelf forever.

The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.

If you wrote a page a day, at the end of the year you would have a book. Whether it's any good or not is beside the point, but you would have a book, instead of just talking about it all the time.

Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.

The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.

Writing a book is a brilliant thing because once you've finished it, you've done it, and there's the potential for it to go on earning you a living without you doing any more work on it. It's absolutely ideal for an idler.

Most people don't realize the many steps that a pop-up goes through. There are a variety of "Dummies" (the sketch phase of the book). Then finally the pencil "dummy", then the finished art which is like painting pieces of a jig saw puzzle.

[M]y first published book had just appeared in stores. The last year of my life-the year of finishing it, editing it, and seeing it through its various page-proof passes-ranks among the most unnerving of my young life. It has not felt good, or freeing. It has felt nerve-shreddingly disquieting. Publication simply allows one that much more to worry about. This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up with new diseases.

I don't have any delusions. I'm not a novelist - I'm a comedian who writes. I love doing the stand-up and the touring and the albums and all that, but it's pretty amazing to go into a library and see your book there.

It's so much better to hand over a finished book than having all these people waiting.

I always try to stay as quiet as possible about a book until it's finished.

What I do is, I'm like a disease that infects real people and I take them over. We can start off in a very journalistic mode describing a character and observing a character - and that's what I do with a lot of characters in my books. And then my imagination eats them alive.

The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.