Paul Auster Quotes
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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 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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The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.
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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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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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I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
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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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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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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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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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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.
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Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.
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We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
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The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
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Fiction creating reality.
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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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We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.
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Bodies count, of course - they count more than we're willing to admit - but we don't fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other. We all know that, but the moment we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, unsubstantial metaphors.
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The truth of the story lies in the details.
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We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.
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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 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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The childhood scenes [ in The Tree of Life] are tremendous. My favorite moment is when the mother levitate - for three seconds. Of course, this is how a child thinks of his mother.