Paul Auster Quotes - Page 7

I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly the relationship between the man who finds the briefcase and the woman whose husband owned the briefcase. It's quite a beautiful passage.

Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.

There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.

The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.

He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny. As he put it in his journal that night: If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of destroying it.

It's an ethical pact I've made with myself and with the reader - not to invent. And when I can't remember, I say I can't remember. I'm just appalled by the memoirs published by people who regurgitate dialogue, conversations from when they were small children, and they go on for three or four pages. I can't even remember what we said to each other ten minutes ago! How can I remember what was said sixty years ago? It's not possible.

We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.

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.

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.

I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don't even have a computer, I don't have a cell phone.

I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.

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.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

I think the act of talking about something - with a friend, or someone in your family, or someone you care about, and you're discussing something that you both admire - can often sharpen your thoughts about what you've read or seen and help you think more clearly about it.

When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn't mean it's not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas.

I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore.

When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.

I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I'm writing long sentences now, something I didn't use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating.

The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.

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.

I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.

I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.

When I look back at experience [with my father], all I can do is feel pity. You know, how torn he was about how to act, what to say. And it seems an important story to me.

I'm in constant inner dialogue with my father still.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.