Author Admits to Faking Bob Dylan Quotes in Bestselling Book

Legacy RecordingsBestselling author Jonah Lehrer has resigned his position as a staff writer for The New Yorker after he admitted that quotes he attributed to Bob Dylan in his latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, were fabricated. The New York ***** reports that Michael C. Moynihan, a writer for Tablet magazine, uncovered Lehrer's deception after he was unable to track down a source for comments that Dylan supposedly made in Imagine about what inspires his creative process.

One passage in question read, "It's a hard thing to describe. It's just this sense that you got something to say."

When Moynihan queried Lehrer about the quotes' origin, he says the 31-year-old author "stonewalled, misled and, eventually, outright **** to me" over a period of a few weeks. Lehrer initially told Moynihan that Dylan's manager had provided access to an unpublished interview with the famed singer/songwriter, but Lehrer eventually admitted that he'd written the quotes himself.

Moynihan also discovered that Lehrer used comments from multiple published interviews and put them together in such a way as to change the meaning of the original statements.

Imagine, which delves into the science behind human creativity, had peaked at #14 on The New York *****' Best Sellers list for hardcover nonfiction books. According to The *****, Lehrer's publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has asked retailers to stop selling Imagine and is offering full refunds for all returned copies.

In a statement announcing his resignation from The New Yorker, Lehrer wrote, "The lies are over now…I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed."