Paul Auster Quotes - Page 3

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.

Dismantling the architecture of my discontent

As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.

I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation.

The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy.

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?

I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work.

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.

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.'

You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.

As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.

Money is the driving force of Hand to Mouth, the lack of money, and all those true stories about strange things in The Red Notebook, coincidences and unlikely events, surprise, the unexpected.

Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.

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.

You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.

Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.