-
After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
Paul Auster -
I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.
Paul Auster
-
It's an ethical pact I've made with myself and with the reader - not to invent. And when I can't remember, I say I can't remember. I'm just appalled by the memoirs published by people who regurgitate dialogue, conversations from when they were small children, and they go on for three or four pages. I can't even remember what we said to each other ten minutes ago! How can I remember what was said sixty years ago? It's not possible.
Paul Auster -
I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.
Paul Auster -
The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
Paul Auster -
Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.
Paul Auster -
I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.
Paul Auster -
For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
Paul Auster
-
I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.
Paul Auster -
Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.
Paul Auster -
There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don't know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It's only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.
Paul Auster -
The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.
Paul Auster -
There is a double rhythm in all human beings. We are binary beings - two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Two legs for walking. And the heartbeat thumping in our chest mirrors that.
Paul Auster -
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
Paul Auster
-
I'm really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.
Paul Auster -
When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.
Paul Auster -
I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.
Paul Auster -
People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.
Paul Auster -
Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
Paul Auster -
The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
Paul Auster
-
As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
Paul Auster -
I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
Paul Auster -
I like the sound a typewriter makes.
Paul Auster -
A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we don't look up, we'll never know what's down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
Paul Auster