Top 360 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Auster
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Paul Auster.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
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.
Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.
I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.
I don't know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn't hurt the book.
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.
Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.
You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.
It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me.
What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That's always first.
Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.
I really have no interest in myself.
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.
I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.
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.
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 woke up one day and thought: 'I want to write a book about the history of my body.' I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy.
I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.
I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
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.
I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.
We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all - most of us, anyway - want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.
There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
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.
I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.
I've always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil - especially for corrections.
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.
Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.
When I'm writing, I don't feel neurotic. So it's better for the family if I'm working.
Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.
The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.
If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I've never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.
With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.
Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.
There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
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.
All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.
The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait.
You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it's a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can't separate persona from psyche; you just can't do it.
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.
We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.
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.
What keeps me up at night? Anxiety. Anxiety, the inability to go to sleep, it's quite literally that.
No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.
Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.
Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.
We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
I'm really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.
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