Paul Auster Quotes
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For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.
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I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.
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Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.
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you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you
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A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.
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Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it
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All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
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I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.
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There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.
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I hate reading digital books. I don't enjoy the experience. I like smelling the paper, turning the pages. I think the book as we've always known it is an efficient technology.
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As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.
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When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.
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Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.
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What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions. Paul Auster
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In my life, I've lived in very different kinds of places - very tiny rooms when I was young. And you do learn to cope with it. The funny thing is, as you begin to inhabit larger places, it's very interesting how quickly you adapt to your space. What seems enormous at first becomes natural after a few weeks.
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There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
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I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.