Paul Auster Quotes
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I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.
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I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can't tell you how lucky I feel, that I've managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I've been able to do what I want to do.
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It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
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For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
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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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Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.
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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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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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Most of my friends' fathers had been in the war - either as soldiers or in some other capacity in the military. Whereas my father had not fought. He was older and he was in a business that was considered essential to the wartime effort - the wire business - and, of course, I was so young I didn't understand any of this.
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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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I know that what's happened in the election has changed American reality, and I understand that I have to change with it. I have to rethink how I live my life. I'm not a political essayist; I don't see that I would have any value cranking out articles for newspapers or magazines, because lots of people are doing that already.
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The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
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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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People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle.
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Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.
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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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The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
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A canteen I remember vividly, and maybe one other thing, I can't remember. And I knew then that he had bought them in an army surplus store that day and he wanted to maybe enhance himself in my eyes, and say, "Well, yes, I have been in the army." Or [he] simply just didn't want to disappoint me. It could have been one or the other. But I knew that he had lied to me. And this filled me with a tremendous sort of anger towards him. At the same time, knowing he was trying to please me, so feeling good about him.
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It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.
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If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics
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It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
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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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Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
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As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out