Paul Auster
All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
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.
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.
People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.
Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.
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.
I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.
I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It's coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don't even know where they are.
Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.
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.
Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.Collection: Memories
People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle.Collection: Eye
What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.Collection: What Matters
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.Collection: Lying
"The weird world rolls on..." meaning that through all the ups and downs, all the travails that we go through, all the horrors, all the wars, all the deaths, all the cruelties, there's still something that keeps us wanting to wake up the next morning and go on with our lives - to make children, to fall in love, to continue humanity.Collection: Falling In Love
Most people just want to be part of the world, they want to live, love, and enjoy themselves - to take part in the world around them. Whereas artists are always retreating, locking the door, and inventing other worlds.Collection: Artist
No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That's what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.Collection: Dark
To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.Collection: Men
As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way outCollection: Dream
It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.Collection: Thinking
It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.Collection: Always Be Happy
Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.Collection: Stories
For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.Collection: Beautiful
Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.Collection: Beautiful
I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.Collection: Powerful
And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.Collection: Book
Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.Collection: Artist
As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.Collection: Boys
Every man is the author of his own life.Collection: Men
When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.Collection: Book
It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.Collection: House
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Live Life
How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?Collection: Thinking
All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Book
We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Hero
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Notebook
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.Collection: Stories
Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.Collection: New York
I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.Collection: Writing
You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.Collection: Crush
Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was.Collection: New York
I don't like talking about my work at all. I find it very difficult. I never know what to say. It's too close to me, and there's so many things happening unconsciously while I'm working that I'm not aware of, and people will point these things out to me, and I'll say, "That's interesting." But I don't know what to make of it.Collection: Talking
Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirelyCollection: Men
We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.Collection: Twilight