Paul Auster Quotes
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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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Every man is the author of his own life.
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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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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 fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
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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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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 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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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 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.
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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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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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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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The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
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You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.
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We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
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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.
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The truth of the story lies in the details.
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Fiction creating reality.
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If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics
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Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.
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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.