Love Quote by Jonathan Lethem

Lethem treats New York less like a setting than like a dependency you pretend you’ve kicked until you catch a whiff of it again. The first move is admission: he “excluded” the city from his writing, a choice that reads like self-protection. For a New York writer, avoiding New York can be a way to dodge cliché, to escape the expectation that every sentence has to thrum with subways and street grit. It can also be a way to reclaim authorship from a place that tends to author you back.

Then he returns and “falls in love” again - not because the city has changed, but because distance has made him newly susceptible. That’s the sleight of hand in the line: the energy isn’t just in New York itself; it’s in the negative space around it. “The energy comes from an absence” is a writer’s paradox, a claim that the most generative material is what you don’t have on hand. Yearning becomes a kind of narrative engine: when you’re away, the city turns into an idea, sharpened by memory, grievance, nostalgia, fantasy. When you’re there, it’s rent and noise and crowds; when you’re gone, it’s possibility.

Context matters: Lethem is a Brooklyn-born novelist who’s watched New York mutate through gentrification, cultural mythmaking, post-9/11 politics, and the endless debate over who “gets” to claim the city. The subtext is that New York’s power isn’t merely local. It’s portable, carried in the ache of leaving and the compulsion to return - a romance sustained by separation, and a craft trick that turns homesickness into prose.