Paul Auster Quotes - Page 6

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• Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.

  Paul Auster

  Children, Book, Bridges

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• That's all I've ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn't matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

  Paul Auster

  Men, Hands, Soul

  Paul Auster (2008). “Collected Novels”

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• I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 6, 2008.

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• Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that's wonderful. But when people have built up a sort of resentment or animosity for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, they read in bad faith.

  Paul Auster

  Honesty, People, Resentment

  Interview with Leonard Pierce, www.avclub.com. November 09, 2010.

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• I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

  Paul Auster

  Play, Translations

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 5, 2009.

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• 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.

  Paul Auster

  Stupid, Believe, Protect

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• I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.

  Paul Auster

  Country, Believe, Opportunity

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 6, 2008.

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• It's like a mathematical law, Grace.

  Paul Auster

  Science, Law, Grace

  Paul Auster (2008). “Oracle Night”, p.109, Faber & Faber

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• Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.

  Paul Auster

  Important, Care, Obsession

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• Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.

  Paul Auster

  Pieces, Literature, Dry

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• 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.

  Paul Auster

  Reading, Men, Important

  "American dreams" by Hadley Freeman, www.theguardian.com. October 26, 2002.

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• Generally, I don't want to do things. I feel lazy and unmotivated. It's only when an idea grabs hold of me and I can't get rid of it, when I try not to think about it and yet it's ambushing me all the time. I'm thrown up against a wall. The idea is saying to me, "You have to pay attention to me because I am going to be the future of your life for the next year or two or five." Then I submit. I get into it. It's something that becomes so necessary to me that I can't live without doing that project.

  Paul Auster

  Wall, Thinking, Lazy

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Writing is, after all, a gesture towards other people, giving something to others. And so it's not a completely hermetic exercise. It's really an opening up.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Exercise, Opening Up

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

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• The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be sympathetic and read each word carefully and understand what I'm writing about. I suppose every writer feels this.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Age, Faces

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

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• I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Goal, Understanding

  "A Connoisseur of Clouds, a Meteorologist of Whims: The Rumpus Interview with Paul Auster". Interview with Juliet Linderman, therumpus.net. November 16, 2009.

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• I never would have thought of that word, "hospitality." I settle into the rhythm of my steps.

  Paul Auster

  Steps, Hospitality, Settling

  "An Interview with Paul Auster" by Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.

  Paul Auster

  Focus, Childhood, Novel

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas for Transatlantica, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.

  Paul Auster

  Real, Way, Imagine

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• I like the sound a typewriter makes.

  Paul Auster

  Typewriters, Sound

  "The mighty Quinn" by James Campbell, www.theguardian.com. November 12, 2005.

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• I met Peter Brook, the theater director, who's been based in Paris for many years at the Bouffes du Nord. I admire him tremendously. Some years ago, he was in New York, and he gave an interview with The Times, and what he said was this: "In my work, I try to capture the closeness of the everyday and the distance of myth. Because, without the closeness, you can't be moved, and without the distance, you can't be amazed." Isn't that extraordinary?

  Paul Auster

  New York, Distance, Paris

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy et Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself

  Paul Auster

  Simple, Opaque, Gains

  Paul Auster (2008). “The New York Trilogy”, p.249, Faber & Faber

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• I thought I was terrible [to play a cameo] and decided never to act again.

  Paul Auster

  Play, Terrible, Cameos

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• 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.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Paper, Shy

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• I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

  Paul Auster

  Looks, I've Learned, Curious

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• For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.

  Paul Auster

  Character, Names, Reason

  Paul Auster, James M. Hutchisson (2013). “Conversations with Paul Auster”, p.206, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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