Paul Auster Quotes
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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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We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.
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The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be sympathetic and read each word carefully and understand what I'm writing about. I suppose every writer feels this.
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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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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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Every man is the author of his own life.
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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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As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
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We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
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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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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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The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
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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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Most of the boys would come with bits of equipment that their fathers had given them from their war days - helmets, canteens, binoculars, these kinds of things - that leant a kind of authenticity to the games we were playing. But, of course, my father never gave me anything. So I began to question him. You know, Why don't you have anything from the war? And I think he was...embarrassed to tell me he hadn't fought, because, you know, little boys want to turn their fathers into heroes, and he didn't want to be diminished in my eyes.
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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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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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Fiction creating reality.
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Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin....Writing as a lesser form of dance.
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If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics
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I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.
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I remember I thought I should become a doctor, even though I had no talent for science whatsoever. Then of course, until I was about sixteen, I thought I might have a shot as a major league baseball player. But once I hit my full adolescence I lost all interest in that. I discovered, in rapid succession, books, girls, alcohol and tobacco, and I've never turned back. Those are the four things I'm most interested in.
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But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
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The truth of the story lies in the details.
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There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.