A Quote by Paul Auster

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.
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.
In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.
Many books in my library are now behind and beneath me. They were good in their way once, and so were the clothes I wore when I was ten years old; but I have outgrown them. Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and deepens with our years.
But we're not this one stupid thing we said three years ago, or ten years ago, or even last week. We seem to judge people as if they are.
I have enough money not to do pictures ever. I'm seventy years old. I don't want to get up at 6:30 in the morning and learn ten pages of dialogue to do with a bunch of creeps I don't like. It's gotta be fun for me.
[Facebook] is shaping a broader web. If you look back for the past five or seven years, the story about social networking has really been about getting people connected... But if you look forward for the next five years, I think that the story people are going to remember five years from now isn't how this one site was built; it is how every single service that you use is now going to be better with your friends.
I feel great. I feel younger. And I don't feel anything at all. I don't know who knows, but right now I'm, how, how many years have I, fifty five, something like that. Forty three years old. And I feel like seventeen, like twenty five years ago.
It's not even so much about publicity, it's more just letting people know that things are available, because books aren't a flash in the pan thing. It's more like: "It took 20 years for this book to be done and now it'll be on a shelf for 20 years until the right person finds it."
I remember I had a low point when I was working on a soap opera, 'General Hospital,' five years ago. It was my first real job, and it was so overwhelming. You would work five days a week and have to learn sometimes up to 30 pages of new dialogue a night, then have one take to shoot it all, the next day.
Remember, if you do the same act for 20, 30 years it gets a little boring unless you've got something else going for you... And the orchestra really kept you going. They'd laugh at all your jokes, even if they'd been hearing them for the last 30 years.
Right now, as I've gotten older, my tics sustain for five or ten years. So, I can deal with them on a daily basis; I know how it affects my body. But when you're 10 years old, and every three months a tic comes along, it's daunting because you don't know what the next one is going to look like, what it's going to feel like.
Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, "How could you have believed that?" because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.
Today, if someone showed me a five-year plan, I'd toss out the pages detailing Years Three, Four and Five as pure fantasy Anyone who thinks he or she can evaluate business conditions five years from now, flunks.
The difference between a 20-something and a 30-something man? Wisdom. At 20 years old, we dont really get how sensitive and beautiful women are. By 30, were finally starting to learn.
I'm appalled at how many people my age, or even five or ten years younger, have no tangible memories of important history that happened when we were growing up.
I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don't know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying - please let me live until I am finished.
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