Paul Auster Quotes - Page 8

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.

Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people - more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true - in certain rare, isolated cases.

When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

The childhood scenes [ in The Tree of Life] are tremendous. My favorite moment is when the mother levitate - for three seconds. Of course, this is how a child thinks of his mother.

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.

I'm not a boy-writer, I've never been. I wanted to be a boy-writer when I was young, and I think that held me back. I wanted to be very clever, and funny, but I'm not very clever and not terribly funny. I've finally accepted my limits, and I do what I can do.

It's a mind going over things, revisiting things, maybe trying to refine the original perception. You have to keep going a thing over in order to make sense off it.

There is a line from the Marina Tsvetaeva poem I'm so fond of: "In this most Christian of worlds/ All poets are Jews." What she means is that writers and artists are outside the normal flow of daily life, the normal flow of society in general.

Actually, screenplays were much more detailed than what I did in the book In the book I had to invent a style for communicating what the sensation of looking at a film would be, whereas the screenplays I wrote in Paris were actual blueprints for how to do the film, with every gesture, every little movement noted in exhaustive detail.

In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.

I thought, "Well, I'm writing about early childhood, so maybe it would make sense to write about late childhood as well, early adulthood." Those were my thoughts, and this was how this crazy book [Winter Journal] was composed. I've never seen a book with pictures like at the end, pictures related to things you've read before.

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.

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.

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.

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.

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.

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.

I'm generous. I give good tips. It's just - the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don't want anything. I'm not a consumer. I don't crave objects.

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

In my later novels, I systematically used the convention, and then a moment came - when did it come? With The Book of Illusions, maybe - I thought, I don't need them anymore, I don't need them, I want to integrate the dialogue into the text.

When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.

How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesnt believe that, about other possibilities?

Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.