Paul Auster Quotes
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The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.
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Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.
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Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.
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You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either.
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If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
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I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.
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This is very rare for anyone in life to pursue something and that thing being the thing you actually most want to do. It's all about the inner, rather than the outer. Whether people like or don't like my work, read it or don't read it, it's just been a gift from the gods that I've been able to sit at my desk for the last almost 50 years and do the things I've wanted to do.
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Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.
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I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
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When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.
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Every man is the author of his own life.
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I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
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I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it's been a very split kind of response.
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In a sense I am able to interrogate myself, address myself from that slight distance and enter a kind of dialogical relationship with myself. Because I'm saying, "Look, these are things that have happened to me, but how odd they are or how ordinary they are [is up to the reader to decide]."
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The best filmmakers, I think, have always had very narrow frameworks for their stories, and then they can go deeply, rather than skimming the surface.
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I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.
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For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail.
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Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.
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I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.
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I'm not a boy-writer, I've never been. I wanted to be a boy-writer when I was young, and I think that held me back. I wanted to be very clever, and funny, but I'm not very clever and not terribly funny. I've finally accepted my limits, and I do what I can do.
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Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
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Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?
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What if I had been born during a war and I lived in an occupied city, and people were being taken out and shot every day? Everything would be different - even after the war ended, my future would be very different. Look at what these poor people in Aleppo are going through. The children, the ones who survive, are going to be absolutely altered by what they live through, and you and I, luckily, have never had to deal with that.
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The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.