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A Book, At The Same Time, Also Has To Do With What I Call A Buzz In The Head. It's A Certain Kind Of Music That I Start Hearing. It's The Music Of The Language, But It's Also The Music Of The Story. I Have To Live With That Music For A While Before I Can Put Any Words On The Page. I Think That's Because I Have To Get My Body As Much As My Mind Accustomed To The Music Of Writing That Particular Book. It Really Is A Mysterious Feeling.

-Paul Auster

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A Book, At The

Paul Auster

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A Book, At The Same Time, Also Has To Do With What I Call A Buzz In The Head. It's A Certain Kind Of Music That I Start Hearing. It's The Music Of The Language, But It's Also The Music Of The Story. I Have To Live With That Music For A While Before I Can Put Any Words On The Page. I Think That's Because I Have To Get My Body As Much As My Mind Accustomed To The Music Of Writing That Particular Book. It Really Is A Mysterious Feeling.

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One Should Never Underestimate The Power Of Books.

Life Is Deeply Tragic And Also Very Comic At The Same Time. It's Everything At Once.

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.

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.

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.

After Something Crystallizes, I Can Write Ferociously And Write Novels In Six Months, Which In The Past Would Have Taken Me Two Years.

The Joke Is The Purest, Most Essential Form Of Storytelling. Every Word Has To Count.

As Long As There's One Person To Believe It, There's No Story That Can't Be True.

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.

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.

The Pictures Do Not Lie, But Neither Do They Tell The Whole Story. They Are Merely A Record Of Time Passing, The Outward Evidence.

Dismantling The Architecture Of My Discontent

There's A Difference Between Doing Memoir And Writing A Novel. If I Had Put The Story Of The Boy Killing My Dog - And That Was Eric Also, What A Little Monster He Was! - In A Novel, Even If I Took It Directly From Life, It Would Be Fiction.

I Think All Writers Are A Bit Crazy; Damaged Souls, Incapable Of Doing Anything Else.

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.

Reason And Memory Are Nearly Always At Odds.

I Don't Read Reviews Any More, But I'm Told By My Publisher Who Gives Me An Account Of What People Have Been Writing And It's Been A Very Split Kind Of Response.

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.

Something Happens, Blue Thinks, And Then It Goes On Happening Forever. It Can Never Be Changed, Can Never Be Otherwise.

In The End, The Art Of Hunger Can Be Described As An Existential Art. It Is A Way Of Looking Death In The Face, And By Death I Mean Death As We Live It Today: Without God, Without Hope Of Salvation. Death As The Abrupt And Absurd End Of Life

In My Life, I've Lived In Very Different Kinds Of Places - Very Tiny Rooms When I Was Young. And You Do Learn To Cope With It. The Funny Thing Is, As You Begin To Inhabit Larger Places, It's Very Interesting How Quickly You Adapt To Your Space. What Seems Enormous At First Becomes Natural After A Few Weeks.

I Hate Reading Digital Books. I Don't Enjoy The Experience. I Like Smelling The Paper, Turning The Pages. I Think The Book As We've Always Known It Is An Efficient Technology.

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.

You Have To Really Have A Taste For Being Alone To Be A Writer.

I Guess The Toughest Things In Translations Are Word Play, Which Can Never Be Reproduced Exactly.

Nothing Lasts, You See, Not Even The Thoughts Inside You. And You Musn't Waste Your Time Looking For Them. Once A Thing Is Gone, That Is The End Of It.

We Have Missed Him In The Sunshine, In The Storm, In The Twilight, Ever Since.

...once You Fell In Love With Her, You Loved Her Until The Day You Died.

Nobody Asks You To Do This. The World Out There Is Not Panting After Another Novelist. We Choose It

When I Write, The Story Is Always Uppermost In My Mind, And I Feel That Everything Must Be Sacrificed To It. All Elegant Passages, All The Curious Details, All The So-called Beautiful Writing - If They Are Not Truly Relevant To What I Am Trying To Say, Then They Have To Go.

This Is Very Rare For Anyone In Life To Pursue Something And That Thing Being The Thing You Actually Most Want To Do. It's All About The Inner, Rather Than The Outer. Whether People Like Or Don't Like My Work, Read It Or Don't Read It, It's Just Been A Gift From The Gods That I've Been Able To Sit At My Desk For The Last Almost 50 Years And Do The Things I've Wanted To Do.

There's Hope For Everyone. That's What Makes The World Go Round.

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.

Fiction Creating Reality.

I Guess The Important Thing For Young Writers Is To Read.

The Story Is Not In The Words; It's In The Struggle.

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.

I've Been Trying To Fit Everything In, Trying To Get To The End Before It's Too Late, But I See Now How Badly I've Deceived Myself. Words Do Not Allow Such Things. The Closer You Come To The End, The More There Is To Say. The End Is Only Imaginary, A Destination You Invent To Keep Yourself Going, But A Point Comes When You Realize You Will Never Get There. You Might Have To Stop, But That Is Only Because You Have Run Out Of Time. You Stop, But That Does Not Mean You Have Come To An End.

He Would Conclude That Nothing Was Real Except Chance.

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.

There's Love, And Certainly Children You Care About More Than Yourself. But Nevertheless, We're Alone In Our Heads.

You Can Survive Only If Nothing Is Necessary To You

Everyone Reads A Different Book. That's What's Interesting. Everyone Sees A Different Film, As Well. We Bring Our Past Lives To Whatever Work Of Art We're Experiencing At That Moment, And That's What Makes It Interesting. It's Not Mathematics. There Are Different Answers For Different People.

A Canteen I Remember Vividly, And Maybe One Other Thing, I Can't Remember. And I Knew Then That He Had Bought Them In An Army Surplus Store That Day And He Wanted To Maybe Enhance Himself In My Eyes, And Say, "well, Yes, I Have Been In The Army." Or [he] Simply Just Didn't Want To Disappoint Me. It Could Have Been One Or The Other. But I Knew That He Had Lied To Me. And This Filled Me With A Tremendous Sort Of Anger Towards Him. At The Same Time, Knowing He Was Trying To Please Me, So Feeling Good About Him.

Stories Surge Up Out Of Nowhere, And If They Feel Compelling, You Follow Them. You Let Them Unfold Inside You And See Where They Are Going To Lead.

When You're Young, You Keep Reading New Writers And You Keep Changing Your Mind About How You Ought To Sound.

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You See, The Interesting Thing About Books, As Opposed, Say, To Films, Is That It's Always Just One Person Encountering The Book, It's Not An Audience, It's One To One.

The Most Challenging Project I've Ever Done, I Think, Is Every Single Thing I've Ever Tried To Do. It's Never Easy.

In My Later Novels, I Systematically Used The Convention, And Then A Moment Came - When Did It Come? With The Book Of Illusions, Maybe - I Thought, I Don't Need Them Anymore, I Don't Need Them, I Want To Integrate The Dialogue Into The Text.

It's A Rare Day When She Speaks In Anything But Platitudes--all Those Exhausted Phrases And Hand-me-down Ideas That Cram The Dump Sites Of Contemporary Wisdom

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At That Point, Noriko Finally Breaks Down And Begins To Cry Sobbing Into Her Hands As The Floodgates Open - This Young Woman Who Has Suffered In Silence For So Long, This Good Woman Who Refuse To Believe She's Good, For Only The Good Doubt Their Own Goodness, Which Is What Makes Them Good In The First Place. The Bad Know They Are Good, But The Good Know Nothing. They Spend Their Lives Forgiving Others, But They Can't Forgive Themselves.

Stories Without Endings Can Do Nothing But Go On Forever, And To Be Caught In One Means That You Must Die Before Your Part In It Is Played Out.

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 Entirely

What Used To Keep Me Up At Night Was The Fact That I Didn't Know How I Was Going To Pay The Rent. Now That I Can Pay The Rent, I'm Worrying About People I Care About, You Know, The People I Love. The Little Aches And Pains Of My Children That I, My Family. That's Always First.

Our Lives Carry Us Along In Ways We Cannot Control, And Almost Nothing Stays With Us. It Dies When We Do, And Death Is Something That Happens To Us Every Day.

In Fact, Writing, Especially Writing Autobiographical Works, And This Is Actually The Fourth Time I've Done It, Each Time I've Done It I've Felt Deeply Immersed In The Material As I'm Doing It, And Then It's Over And Everything Is The Same.

Our Lives Don't Really Belong To Us, You See -- They Belong To The World, And In Spite Of Our Efforts To Make Sense Of It, The World Is A Place Beyond Our Understanding.

It's June Second, He Told Himself. Try To Remember That. This Is New York, And Tomorrow Will Be June Third. If All Goes Well, The Following Day Will Be The Fourth. But Nothing Is Certain.

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.

He Slipped Away Slowly, Withdrawing From This World By Small, Imperceptible Degrees, And In The End It Was As If He Were A Drop Of Water Evaporating In The Sun, Shrinking And Shrinking Until At Last He Wasn’t There Anymore.

To Leave The World A Little Better Than You Found It. That's The Best A Man Can Ever Do.

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.

The Real Is Always Way Ahead Of What We Can Imagine.

Things Have Not Changed As Much As We Would Like To Think They Have. Or Maybe We're Just In Another One Of The Divided Moments In The Country. The Late '60s Certainly Was One Of Them, The Civil War Being Another, But I'm Hard-pressed To Think Of Too Many.

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.

As Siri Says, Who Is Deeply Involved With Neuroscience, Emotion Consolidates Memory, And I Think That's True.

When I Look Back At Experience [with My Father], All I Can Do Is Feel Pity. You Know, How Torn He Was About How To Act, What To Say. And It Seems An Important Story To Me.

It's Extremely Difficult To Get These Jobs Because You Can't Get A Job On A Ship Unless You Have Seaman's Paper's, And You Can't Get Seaman's Papers Unless You Have A Job On A Ship. There Had To Be A Way To Break Through The Circle, And He Was The One Who Arranged It For Me.

It's Beyond The Grasp Of Anyone's Memory To Recall Conversations In Kind Of [memoir] Detail. So It's Fake. It's All Made Up.

A Book, At The Same Time, Also Has To Do With What I Call A Buzz In The Head. It's A Certain Kind Of Music That I Start Hearing. It's The Music Of The Language, But It's Also The Music Of The Story. I Have To Live With That Music For A While Before I Can Put Any Words On The Page. I Think That's Because I Have To Get My Body As Much As My Mind Accustomed To The Music Of Writing That Particular Book. It Really Is A Mysterious Feeling.

There Are Often References To Childhood, But They're Rarely The Focus Of The [my] 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 Am Very Scared At The Beginning Of Each Book, Because I've Never Written It Before. I Feel I Have To Teach Myself How To Do It.

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.

I Don't Like That Word [memoir]. Whenever My Publishers Have Wanted To Use It, I've Told Them To Take It Away.

You Find The Book In The Process Of Doing It. That's The Adventure Of The Job.

For One Reason Or Another, I Became A Passionate Reader When I Was Very Little. As Soon As I Could Read, I Wanted To Read.

I'd Go Nuts. Because People Look At The Same Passage And One Person Will Say This Is The Best Thing He's Ever Read, And Another Person Will Say It's Absolutely Idiotic. I Mean, There's No Way To Reconcile Those Two Things. You Just Have To Forget The Whole Business Of What People Are Saying.

The Things We Remember Are Often Things That Have Great Emotional Importance, And So They Have A Lasting Effect.

Cities - I'm Attracted To Them, And I Have A Special Attachment To New York...it's My Place.

As Long As You Are Dreaming, There Is Always A Way Out

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.

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.

When I Am Writing, Even Though It's Hard And I Do Struggle Often, I Am Happier Than When I'm Not Writing. I Feel Alive. Whereas When I'm Not Writing, I Feel Like Your Common Every-day Neurotic.

Novels Are Fictions And Therefore They Tell Lies, But Through Those Lies Every Novelist Attempts To Tell The Truth About The World.

If The World Weren't Such A Beautiful Place, We Might All Turn Into Cynics

No One Wants To Be Part Of A Fiction, And Even Less So If That Fiction Is Real.

My Wife Is My First Reader, My First Line Of Defence I Suppose. So She Says, "oh Well, Oh Yes, It's All True." At The Same Time, I Could Have Written Much More About Us, But I Didn't Want To Go Any Further. I Did Cut Things Out. There Are Certain Things That I Wrote About Her That Are So Gushing With Praise And Admiration That When I Looked At Those Passages I Realised They Would Be Ridiculous To Anybody Else.

Artists Are The People For Whom The World Is Not Enough.

Stories Only Happen To Those Who Are Able To Tell Them.

I Walk Around The World Like A Ghost, And Sometimes I Question Whether I Even Exist. Whether I've Ever Existed At All.

Some Things Get Written More Quickly Than Others, But I Can't Really Measure Degrees Of Difficulty.

I've Been Very Lucky In This Second Marriage. It's Just Luck. It's Absolute Luck. And I Can Only Marvel At It. So Many Other Things Could Have Happened That Didn't, So Overall I Feel Blessed.

Second Marriage

It Often Happens That Things Are Other Than What They Seem, And You Can Get Yourself Into Trouble By Jumping To Conclusions.

All Children Are Love Children, He Said, But Only The Best Ones Are Ever Called That.

I Thought, "well, I'm Writing About Early Childhood, So Maybe It Would Make Sense To Write About Late Childhood As Well, Early Adulthood." Those Were My Thoughts, And This Was How This Crazy Book [winter Journal] Was Composed. I've Never Seen A Book With Pictures Like At The End, Pictures Related To Things You've Read Before.

We're Outsiders, And So When We Walk Through The City, We're There And Not There At The Same Time, Participating And Observing Simultaneously.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There Is Nothing More Terrible, I Learned, Than Having To Face The Objects Of A Dead Man. Things Are Inert: That Have Meaning Only In Function Of The Life That Makes Use Of Them. When That Life Ends, The Things Change, Even Though They Remain The Same. […] They Say Something To Us, Standing There Not As Objects But As Remnants Of Thought, Of Consciousness, Emblems Of The Solitude In Which A Man Comes To Make Decisions About Himself.

I Like The Sound A Typewriter Makes.

Each Book I've Done Somehow Finds Its Own Unique Form, A Specific Way It Has To Be Written, And Once I Find It, I Stick With It.

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.

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.

I Feel Now, In My Impending Old Age, Very Lucky. I Just Can't Tell You How Lucky I Feel, That I've Managed To First Of All, Stay Alive This Long, In Reasonably Good Health, And That I've Been Able To Do What I Want To Do.

Changing Your Mind Is Probably One Of The Most Beautiful Things People Can Do. And I've Changed My Mind About A Lot Of Things Over The Years.

People Who Don't Like My Work Say That The Connections Seem Too Arbitrary. But That's How Life Is.

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.

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.'

The Mental State I'm In Is Completely Different, But The Act Of Trying To Write Is The Same. I Mean, In All Instances You Try To Write Good Sentences. But In A Novel You're Free To Do Whatever You Want, And In The Autobiographical Works You Can't Make Things Up.

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.

I Use Things, I Steal Things From My Life When I Want To, When I Need To, Or When It Seems Appropriate. But Most Of The Stuff In My Novels Is Entirely Invented, Ninety-five Percent. And Even When I Do Borrow Something, It Becomes Fictionalized.

The Fiction Is Not Autobiographical. Maybe To Some Extent It Is, Of Course.

There Is A Double Rhythm In All Human Beings. We Are Binary Beings - Two Arms, Two Legs, Two Eyes, Two Ears. Two Legs For Walking. And The Heartbeat Thumping In Our Chest Mirrors That.

For Me A Paragraph In A Novel Is A Bit Like A Line In A Poem. It Has Its Own Shape, Its Own Music, Its Own Integrity.

I Wrote Report From The Interior Was That After I Finished Winter Journal, I Took A Pause, And I Realized There Was More I Wanted To Say.

I've Written Books That Have Taken Me Fifteen Years, From First Sentence To Last, And Some That Only Take Three Or Four Months.

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.

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?

It Was A Wrong Number That Started It, The Telephone Ringing Three Times In The Dead Of Night, And The Voice On The Other End Asking For Someone He Was Not.

Everything Can Change At Any Moment, Suddenly And Forever.

Just Think It, And Chances Are It Will Happen.

I Remember I Thought I Should Become A Doctor, Even Though I Had No Talent For Science Whatsoever. Then Of Course, Until I Was About Sixteen, I Thought I Might Have A Shot As A Major League Baseball Player. But Once I Hit My Full Adolescence I Lost All Interest In That. I Discovered, In Rapid Succession, Books, Girls, Alcohol And Tobacco, And I've Never Turned Back. Those Are The Four Things I'm Most Interested In.

I Know The Pleasure You Get From Making Your Films. The Intense Involvement In Every Aspect: The Acting, The Camera, The Colors, The Costumes, Even The Hair And Makeup. Editing Is Thrilling. Everything To Do With Films Is Absorbing - Everything But The Money Part, The Business. But I'm Deeply Glad I've Had That Experience.

Eighteen Is A Terrible Age, And While I Walked Around With The Conviction That I Was Somehow More Grown-up Than My Classmates, The Truth Was That I Had Merely Found A Different Way Of Being Young.

Writing Has Always Had A Tactile Quality For Me. It's A Physical Experience.

I Barely Can Go Shopping For Clothes. I Find It Difficult To Walk Into Stores. The Whole Thing Bores Me So Much.

I Had Made An Empirical Discovery And It Carried All The Weight Of A Mathematical Proof.

Books Demand More. You Have To Be A More Active Participant.

It's A Mind Going Over Things, Revisiting Things, Maybe Trying To Refine The Original Perception. You Have To Keep Going A Thing Over In Order To Make Sense Off It.

[charles] Reznikoff Was In Between Faiths, In Between Worlds... A Double, Hyphenated American. I Think It Probably Goes Deeper Than That.

In Invisible There's A Lot About Childhood, The Death Of The Brother And Then The Relationship Between The Brother And Sister.

Brothers And Sisters

If You're Not Ready For Everything, You're Not Ready For Anything.

And Now We Get To The Hard Part. The Endings, The Farewells, And The Famous Last Words. If You Don't Hear From Me Often, Remember That You're In My Thoughts.

As My Friend George Oppen Once Said To Me About Getting Old: What A Strange Thing To Happen To A Little Boy.

The Truth Of The Story Lies In The Details.

Films And Television And Even Comic Books Are Churning Out Vast Quantities Of Fictional Narratives, And The Public Continues To Swallow Them Up With Great Passion. That Is Because Human Beings Need Stories.

Film And Television

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.

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.

We Hear Things, But We Can't Always See Them, Or, Even If We Do See Them, We're Not Sure That We're Seeing Correctly. Hence: Invisible.

I Say At The Very End Of "winter Journal" That I Do Dream About My Father Often. I Think I Have A Tremendous Compassion For Him, Which Has Grown Over The Years. A Certain Kind Of Pity For Him Also In That He Was So Unrealised As A Human Being, So Dogged, And So Shut-off From People In Many Ways. You Know, I've Been Writing Another Book, And It's Another Non-fiction Autobiographical Work, Kind Of A Compliment To "winter Journal", And It's Just Finished.

Movies Are Not Novels, And That's Why, When Filmmakers Try To Adapt Novels, Particularly Long Or Complex Novels, The Result Is Almost Always Failure. It Can't Be Done.

I Never Would Have Thought Of That Word, "hospitality." I Settle Into The Rhythm Of My Steps.

Once You Finish A Book, It Doesn't Belong To You Anymore. You're Giving It To Other People. If Something In What A Writer Writes Can Excite The Imagination And The Feelings Of The Reader, Then That Reader Carries It Around Forever. Nothing Is More Vivid Than Good Fiction.

All Through My Writing Life I've Had This Impulse To Write Autobiographical Works.

The Book That Convinced Me I Wanted To Be A Writer Was 'crime And Punishment'. I Put The Thing Down After Reading It In A Fever Over Two Or Three Days... I Said, 'if This Is What A Book Can Be, Then That Is What I Want To Do.'

I Never Experiment With Anything In My Books. Experimentation Means You Don't Know What You're Doing.

Becoming A Writer Is Not A 'career Decision' Like Becoming A Doctor Or A Policeman. You Don't Choose It So Much As Get Chosen, And Once You Accept The Fact That You're Not Fit For Anything Else, You Have To Be Prepared To Walk A Long, Hard Road For The Rest Of Your Days.

For Example, When I Was Writing Leviathan, Which Was Written Both In New York And In Vermont - I Think There Were Two Summers In Vermont, In That House I Wrote About In Winter Journal, That Broken-down House... I Was Working In An Out-building, A Kind Of Shack, A Tumble-down, Broken-down Mess Of A Place, And I Had A Green Table. I Just Thought, "well, Is There A Way To Bring My Life Into The Fiction I'm Writing, Will It Make A Difference?" And The Fact Is, It Doesn't Make Any Difference. It Was A Kind Of Experiment Which Couldn't Fail.

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.

I Have Difficulty Orienting Myself In Space, And I'm Probably One Of The Few People Who Gets Lost In Manhattan.

He No Longer Wished To Be Dead. At The Same Time, It Cannot Be Said That He Was Glad To Be Alive. But At Least He Did Not Resent It. He Was Alive, And The Stubbornness Of This Fact Had Little By Little Begun To Fascinate Him - As If He Had Managed To Outlive Himself, As If He Were Somehow Living A Posthumous Life.

Glad To Be Alive

Most People Are Participating In The Grand Adventure Of Living With One Another.

The Funny Thing Is That I Feel Close To All My Characters. Deep, Deep Inside Them All. I Can't Describe How Deeply I Love Them All.

Paintings. Or The Collapse Of Time In Images.

There Is A Line From The Marina Tsvetaeva Poem I'm So Fond Of: "in This Most Christian Of Worlds/ All Poets Are Jews." What She Means Is That Writers And Artists Are Outside The Normal Flow Of Daily Life, The Normal Flow Of Society In General.

[lev] Tolstoy Is Not A Boy-writer. He's A Grown-up. And [fedor] Doestoeivski Is Not A Boy-writer.

We Grow Older, But We Do Not Change. We Become More Sophisticated, But At Bottom We Continue To Resemble Our Young Selves, Eager To Listen To The Next Story And The Next, And The Next.

Having Made Films, I Know Very Well That The Scope Of The Average 90- To 120-minute Movie Is About The Same Narrative Heft As A Long Short Story Or A Novella.

Even In New York, There Are A Lot Of Very Attractive Girls Pedaling Around. That Just Happens To Be One Of The Nice Sights In Our City, Seeing A Young Woman On A Bike.

The Kind Of Fiction I'm Trying To Write Is About Telling The Truth.

Escaping Into A Film Is Not Like Escaping Into A Book. Books Force You To Give Something Back To Them, To Exercise Your Intelligence And Imagination, Where As You Can Watch A Film-and Even Enjoy It-in A State Of Mindless Passivity.

Every Book Is An Image Of Solitude. It Is A Tangible Object That One Can Pick Up, Put Down, Open, And Close, And Its Words Represent Many Months If Not Many Years, Of One Man’s Solitude, So That With Each Word One Reads In A Book One Might Say To Himself That He Is Confronting A Particle Of That Solitude

Chance Is An Element Of Life. What I Try To Do Is Study What I Call The Mechanics Of Reality As Carefully As I Can.

But Lost Chances Are As Much A Part Of Life As Chances Taken, And A Story Cannot Dwell On What Might Have Been.

All I Wanted To Do Was Write - At The Time, Poems, And Prose, Too. I Guess My Ambition Was Simply To Make Money However I Could To Keep Myself Going In Some Modest Way, And I Didn't Need Much, I Was Unmarried At The Time, No Children.

We Construct A Narrative For Ourselves, And That's The Thread That We Follow From One Day To The Next. People Who Disintegrate As Personalities Are The Ones Who Lose That Thread.

Bodies Count, Of Course - They Count More Than We're Willing To Admit - But We Don't Fall In Love With Bodies, We Fall In Love With Each Other. We All Know That, But The Moment We Go Beyond A Catalogue Of Surface Qualities And Appearances, Words Begin To Fail Us, To Crumble Apart In Mystical Confusions And Cloudy, Unsubstantial Metaphors.

Falling In Love

It Seems To Me That I Will Always Be Happy In The Place Where I Am Not.

Always Be Happy

You Can't Put Your Feet On The Ground Until You've Touched The Sky.

Feet On The Ground

When The Publisher Here In America Wanted To Put The Word "memoir" On The Title Page [of 'winter Journal'] And On The Cover, I Said, "no, No, No, No, No, No." No Genre Whatsoever. It's An Independent Work Not Really Connected To Those Things At All.

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.

I Haven't Done Any Translating For Decades Now. It's Something I Did When I Was Young.

"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.

Falling In Love

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.

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.

Memory Is The Space In Which A Thing Happens For A Second Time.

I Woke Up One Day And Thought: I Want To Write A Book About The History Of My Body. I Could Justify Talking About My Mother Because It Was In Her Body That My Body Began.

I'm Generous. I Give Good Tips. It's Just - The Way I Live My Life, Ironically Enough, Is: I Don't Want Anything. I'm Not A Consumer. I Don't Crave Objects.

Surely It Is An Odd Way To Spend Your Life - Sitting Alone In A Room With A Pen In Your Hand, Hour After Hour, Day After Day, Year After Year, Struggling To Put Words On Pieces Of Paper In Order To Give Birth To What Does Not Exist - Except In Your Head. Why On Earth Would Anyone Want To Do Such A Thing? The Only Answer I Have Ever Been Able To Come Up With Is: Because You Have To, Because You Have No Choice.

I Thought I Was Terrible [to Play A Cameo] And Decided Never To Act Again.

I Think There Might Be Some Pressure Released While I'm Doing Autobiographical Work, But Afterwards Everything Remains The Same.

All Men Contain Several Men Inside Them, And Most Of Us Bounce From One Self To Another Without Ever Knowing Who We Are.

The Biggest Book For Me, When I Was Fifteen, Was Crime And Punishment, Which I Read In A Kind Of Fever. When I Put It Down, I Thought, If This Is What Novels Are Then I Want To Be A Novelist.

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.

The World Is So Unpredictable. Things Happen Suddenly, Unexpectedly. We Want To Feel We Are In Control Of Our Own Existence. In Some Ways We Are, In Some Ways We're Not. We Are Ruled By The Forces Of Chance And Coincidence.

Unpredictable Things

I Was Born Just After The End Of World War Ii, And With My Friends In Our Little Suburban Backyards In New Jersey, We Used To Play War A Lot. I Don't Know If Boys Still Play War, They Probably Do, But We Were Thrusting Ourselves Into Recent History And We Were Always Fighting Either The Nazis Or The Japanese.

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 Guess I Wanted To Leave America For Awhile. It Wasn't That I Wanted To Become An Expatriate, Or Just Never Come Back, I Needed Some Breathing Room. I'd Already Been Translating French Poetry, I'd Been To Paris Once Before And Liked It Very Much, And So I Just Went.

Let Me Tell You, There's No Better Medicine Than A Friendly Card Game For Sloughing Off The Cares Of A Workaday World.

I Think That's What Turns Young Men And Women Into Writers - The Happiness You Discover Living In Books.

I Believe That The Whole Idea Of The Consumer Society Is Tottering. We've Kept Ourselves Going By Producing More And More Goods, Most Of Which People Don't Need. I'm Anti-consumerism; I Own Four Pairs Of Black Levis And That's It.

Money's Important. Everyone Cares About Money. And When You Don't Have Money, Money Becomes The Overriding Obsession Of Your Life.

I Never Feel I'm Standing On Solid Ground, And I Do Write With A Certain Kind Of Trembling Fear.

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.

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