Paul Auster Quotes
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I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
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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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All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.
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In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.
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The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can't describe how deeply I love them all.
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The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy.
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Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
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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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Even when I'm just sitting at my desk, I have to get up every twenty minutes or so and walk around, walk around, walk around, and then I can go back to the page. I can't just sit there for hours at a time. Language comes out of the body as much as the mind.
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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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I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.
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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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The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect.
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Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.
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To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.
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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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As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.
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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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...once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.
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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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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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What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?
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I like the sound a typewriter makes.
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We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.