Paul Auster Quotes
Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.
Quotes to Explore
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Inappropriateness is funny to me. Rudeness is hilarious.
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So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down.
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My music is not just about entertainment. It is about enlightenment also.
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I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.
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I'm one of those people if you ask, 'What's your favourite song?' I'm going to give you five. I don't have just one favourite.
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When I was 13, I started working in a nightclub with Ray Charles. That's the greatest school in the world, the school of the streets. Ray taught me how to read in Braille. He was only two years older than me, but it was like he was 100 years older.
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I've never met a woman who thinks they've got a good enough figure - however perfect they look - which is sad, because no one else can see these perceived flaws; they're entirely internal.
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Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.
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If you think about stuff that happened when you were young, it stays with you forever.
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Wanting to be understood by an audience that didn't know Russian, I tried to paint musical pictures by emphasizing the phrasing, using voice color more boldly, and varying the shade and nuance.
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The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
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Spiritual relationship is far more precious than physical. Physical relationship divorced from spiritual is body without soul.
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Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.
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I'm not Mr. Mom, but there's just certain things I won't say anymore.
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My parents are so cool, so chill, super hip. They know what's up.
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I think there's a karmic purpose that souls make before they decide to come into people's bodies and become someone's parent, or become someone's child. Maybe my dad disappearing was his way of giving me material with which to work, or a predisposition to feel heightened emotions.
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I stuff animals I find; I do roadkill. They're strangely fun to have. They're like easy-to-control pets.
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The expectation was that 'True Confessions' would be my first published book, but that didn't happen. After it was rejected by every publisher in New York and Canada, I shoved it in a closet and went on to write and publish my next three books.
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Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain's ready room died it was always a sad moment.
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I'm not giving up my history and what I've done in my music because I love it and I'm very proud of it. I just want to open it up for more people.
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If I were to say that I grew up in East Los Angeles in the projects poor, I assumed that everybody understood that it came with its own reasons for being the way I am. I didn't get that people needed to understand where my comedy came from; I thought that they knew that. Now I tell people.
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We put the labels we choose on things [...], and for our own purposes. That is the long and the short of it.
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Even though I knew I was inside the space shuttle getting ready to go fly, something about it wasn't completely real up until we got the call at about one minute to go, to close and lock our visors and start our oxygen flow. People often ask me, "What did it feel like right at the moment of launch?" And they're surprised when I tell them actually what I felt was relief. It wasn't like being anxious or scared or anything. It was relief because this is something I had wanted to do my whole life and now that the boosters had lit, we were on our way to go do it and nothing was going to stop us.
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Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.
