Paul Auster Quotes - Page 9

In the old physics, three times two equals six and two times three equals 6 are reversible propositions. Not in quantum physics. Three times two and two times three are two different matters, distinct and separate propositions.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

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.

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life

it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom

In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.

Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity.

When every card in the deck is stacked against you, the only way to win a hand is to break the rules. You beg, borrow, and steal, as the old adage goes, and if you happen to get caught in the act, at least you´ve gone down fighting the good fight.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

and now we get to the hard part. the endings, the farewells, and the famous last words. if you don't hear from me often, remember that you're in my thoughts.

Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it

There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.

but even the facts do not always tell the truth

I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.

It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.

When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word "memoir" on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.