Paul Auster Quotes
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Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.
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The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
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The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
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I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.
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For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
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Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.
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The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.
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The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'
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When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.
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The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
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After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
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I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.
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A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we don't look up, we'll never know what's down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
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It's an ethical pact I've made with myself and with the reader - not to invent. And when I can't remember, I say I can't remember. I'm just appalled by the memoirs published by people who regurgitate dialogue, conversations from when they were small children, and they go on for three or four pages. I can't even remember what we said to each other ten minutes ago! How can I remember what was said sixty years ago? It's not possible.
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As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
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I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
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Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.
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We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.
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I'm really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.
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Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
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I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.
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I like the sound a typewriter makes.
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People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.
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In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.