Love Quote by Jonathan Lethem

Lethem’s “Honestly” is doing quiet PR work: it frames the shift not as abandonment but as a natural evolution, an artist aging out of one identity into another. Comics aren’t dismissed on their merits; they’re quarantined as “nostalgia,” a word that both honors their formative power and gently demotes them to the realm of childhood attachment. That’s the subtextual bargain here: yes, comics mattered, but their claim on the present has weakened.

What makes the line effective is its attention to cultural hierarchy without openly endorsing it. “Most of that energy” suggests a finite creative fuel being reallocated from one medium to others, as if the artist’s attention were a budget. Literature and film arrive as the grown-up destinations, not just different tastes but institutions with heavier cultural capital. Lethem, a novelist steeped in pop detritus and high-literary reference alike, is uniquely positioned to make this move without sounding like a snob. He’s not saying comics are lesser; he’s saying his relationship to them has become historical.

The phrase also hints at a generational context. For writers who came up when comics were still routinely treated as disposable, loving them could be a private, even furtive pleasure. To call it nostalgia is to admit how deeply that early encounter imprinted, while still granting himself permission to be publicly ambitious in “literature” and cinematically minded storytelling. It’s a statement about taste, yes, but also about self-fashioning: the artist choosing the mediums that best match his current hunger for complexity, scale, and cultural conversation.