Paul Auster Quotes - Page 5

It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.

Things have not changed as much as we would like to think they have. Or maybe we're just in another one of the divided moments in the country. The late '60s certainly was one of them, the Civil War being another, but I'm hard-pressed to think of too many.

I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.

Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.

The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect.

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.

I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.

That's all I've ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn't matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.

I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.

Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that's wonderful. But when people have built up a sort of resentment or animosity for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, they read in bad faith.

You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either.

I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.

But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.

There is a double rhythm in all human beings. We are binary beings - two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Two legs for walking. And the heartbeat thumping in our chest mirrors that.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

Money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.

Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.

It's like a mathematical law, Grace.

Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.

Writing is, after all, a gesture towards other people, giving something to others. And so it's not a completely hermetic exercise. It's really an opening up.

Generally, I don't want to do things. I feel lazy and unmotivated. It's only when an idea grabs hold of me and I can't get rid of it, when I try not to think about it and yet it's ambushing me all the time. I'm thrown up against a wall. The idea is saying to me, "You have to pay attention to me because I am going to be the future of your life for the next year or two or five." Then I submit. I get into it. It's something that becomes so necessary to me that I can't live without doing that project.

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.