Paul Auster Quotes
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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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I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation.
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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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You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.
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Most people are participating in the grand adventure of living with one another.
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As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
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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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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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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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Actually, screenplays were much more detailed than what I did in the book In the book I had to invent a style for communicating what the sensation of looking at a film would be, whereas the screenplays I wrote in Paris were actual blueprints for how to do the film, with every gesture, every little movement noted in exhaustive detail.
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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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If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
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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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I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
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Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.
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I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.
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I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore.
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Most people just want to be part of the world, they want to live, love, and enjoy themselves - to take part in the world around them. Whereas artists are always retreating, locking the door, and inventing other worlds.
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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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Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’
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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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When every card in the deck is stacked against you, the only way to win a hand is to break the rules. You beg, borrow, and steal, as the old adage goes, and if you happen to get caught in the act, at least you´ve gone down fighting the good fight.
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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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Fiction creating reality.