Paul Auster
You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.Collection: Book
I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.Collection: Thinking
I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.Collection: Important
There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.Collection: Focus
The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.Collection: Real
Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.Collection: Life Is
Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’Collection: Memories
I thought I was terrible [to play a cameo] and decided never to act again.Collection: Play
No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himselfCollection: Simple
I was extremely shy. And I simply didn't know how to go about it. It seemed a lot easier to write than to make films. All I needed was a pencil and a piece of paper, whereas filmmaking was something I had no access to.Collection: Writing
Guilt kept me going. It was impossible not to blame myself for what had happened, but even guilt was a comfort. It was a human feeling, a sign that I was still attached to the same world that other men lived in.Collection: Men
Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.Collection: Writing
Even you, who’ve lived inside your body for 64 years, would apparently be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to think of your ear or one of your eyes or elbow, also familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. 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: Taken
Yes, she is in love with him, and yes, in spite of his qualms and inner hesitations, he loves her back, however improbable that might seem to him. Note here for the record that he is not someone with a special fixation on young girls. Until now, all the women in his life have been more or less his own age. Pilar therefore does not represent an embodiment of some ideal female type for him--she is merely herself, a small piece of luck he stumbled across one afternoon in a public park, an exception to every rule.Collection: Girl
In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.Collection: Mystery
Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within...By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.Collection: Eye
For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself – and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths.Collection: Commitment
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Writing
While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Men
Don't be a writer, it's a terrible way to live your life, there's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it.Collection: Mean
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: Reading
The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Firsts
As long as there’s one person to believe it, there’s no story that can’t be true.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Reading
I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Stories
Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can’t we?Collection: Country
When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.Collection: Reading
I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I’m not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.Collection: Stories