“It’s a hard thing to describe,” Bob Dylan once mused about the creative process. “It’s just this sense that you got something to say.” 
 
 The sense that one has something to say, some story to relate, is the stuff that fuels all writers. An article in Tablet magazine revealed that in his best-selling book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” Mr. Lehrer had fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan, one of the most closely studied musicians alive. Only last month, Mr. Lehrer had publicly apologized for taking some of his previous work from The Wall Street Journal, Wired and other publications and recycling it in blog posts for The New Yorker, acts of recycling that his editor called “a mistake.” 
 
 By Monday, when the Tablet article was published online, both The New Yorker and Mr. Lehrer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, made it clear that they had lost patience with him. On The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list of Aug. 5, “Imagine” held the No. When contacted, Lehrer provided an explanation for some of my archival failures: He claimed to have been given access, by Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen, to an extended—and unreleased—interview shot for Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home. Pressed for an explanation, Mr. Lehrer “stonewalled, misled and, eventually, outright lied to me” over several weeks, Mr. Moynihan wrote, first claiming to have been given access by Mr. Dylan’s manager to an unreleased interview with the musician. (And it’s not clear how Lehrer divines that Dylan said this “whenever” he read about himself.) Mr. Moynihan also wrote that Mr. Lehrer had spliced together Dylan quotes from separate published interviews and, when the quotes were accurate, he took them well out of context.
– A New Yorker staff writer has quit the magazine and confessed to attributing phony quotes to Bob Dylan, reports the New York Times' Media Decoder blog. Jonah Lehrer says he initially panicked when cornered by a reporter about the quotes in Lehrer's book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. "I told [him] that they were from archival interview footage provided to me by Dylan’s representatives," said Lehrer in a statement. "This was a lie spoken in a moment of panic." Even when the reporter, Michael Moynihan, followed up with Lehrer, the New Yorker scribe continued to lie. But "the lies are over now," said Lehrer. "I understand the gravity of my position." He explained that the quotes were either wholesale lies, "unintentional misquotations," or blends of "previously existing quotes." New Yorker editor David Remnick called it a "terrifically sad situation." Oddly enough, Lehrer had already stolen from his own articles. (See Moynihan's original article in Tablet.)