Paul Auster Thinking Quotations

I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

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.

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.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy.

You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, 'Of course they like it. They should like it.'

I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

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.

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.

I find it impossible to start a project without the title in mind. I can sometimes spend years thinking of the title to go with the thing that's forming in my head. A title defines the project somehow and if you keep finding the ramifications of the title in the work it becomes better, I'm convinced of this.

[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.

I'm not a boy-writer, I've never been. I wanted to be a boy-writer when I was young, and I think that held me back. I wanted to be very clever, and funny, but I'm not very clever and not terribly funny. I've finally accepted my limits, and I do what I can do.

I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

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.

I think the act of talking about something - with a friend, or someone in your family, or someone you care about, and you're discussing something that you both admire - can often sharpen your thoughts about what you've read or seen and help you think more clearly about it.

Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.

As says who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true.

I don't even own a computer. I write by hand then I type it up on an old manual typewriter. But I cross out a lot - I'm not writing in stone tablets, it's just ink on paper. I don't feel comfortable without a pen or a pencil in my hand. I can't think with my fingers on the keyboard. Words are generated for me by gripping the pen, and pressing the point on the paper.

There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don't know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It's only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.

I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

I think people are trying out ideas with the new technology and it's too early to say where it's going exactly. But again, whether it's digital or paper, it doesn't matter. It's words that somebody is reading and getting an experience out of that reading. That's all that really matters.

The childhood scenes [ in The Tree of Life] are tremendous. My favorite moment is when the mother levitate - for three seconds. Of course, this is how a child thinks of his mother.

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.

A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we don't look up, we'll never know what's down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.

I think there might be some pressure released while I'm doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.

I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.

Just think it, and chances are it will happen.

I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.

I wanted to do something different. Therefore, the first person I thought would have been too exclusionary. It would have said me, me, me, me, me. I, I, I, I, I. As if I were pushing away my experiences from the experiences of others. Because basically what I was trying to do was show our commonality. I mean to say, in the very ordinariness of what I recount I think perhaps the reader will find resonances with his or her own life.

I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.

How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?

When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.

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.

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.

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.

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....

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.

I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet - an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we think about them so much that we name a ship after them. The imaginary lives on in the real.

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

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.

Often it's true that films just go right through us. 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.

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.

The best filmmakers, I think, have always had very narrow frameworks for their stories, and then they can go deeply, rather than skimming the surface.