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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When you can see the beauty of a tree, then you will know what love is.
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Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.
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Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?
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No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.
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And oh! I shall find how, day by day, All thoughts and things look older; How the laugh of pleasure grows less gay, And the heart of friendship colder.
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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.
