Paul Auster Quotes
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Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.
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To tell you the truth, I'm not unhappy about it. I'm not even sure that I like the idea of adapting novels into films. It's very difficult to do, and it usually doesn't work. There are exceptions, but generally speaking, one feels disappointed with the result.
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It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
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I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.
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You find the book in the process of doing it. That's the adventure of the job.
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This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly - with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe.
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No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.
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As Siri says, who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true.
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In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.
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Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.
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Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
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Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
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I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.
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I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
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I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
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Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.
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We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
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I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.
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Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
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He slipped away slowly, withdrawing from this world by small, imperceptible degrees, and in the end it was as if he were a drop of water evaporating in the sun, shrinking and shrinking until at last he wasn’t there anymore.
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You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, 'Of course they like it. They should like it.'
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I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.
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The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.
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All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.