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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.

-Paul Auster

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A Here Exists Only

Paul Auster

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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.

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Every Generation Always Thinks It Was Better Before, And I Think People Have Been Saying This For Probably Thousands Of Years.

Actually, Screenplays Were Much More Detailed Than What I Did In The Book In The Book I Had To Invent A Style For Communicating What The Sensation Of Looking At A Film Would Be, Whereas The Screenplays I Wrote In Paris Were Actual Blueprints For How To Do The Film, With Every Gesture, Every Little Movement Noted In Exhaustive Detail.

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.

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.

In The End, Each Life Is No More Than The Sum Of Contingent Facts, A Chronicle Of Chance Intersections, Of ﬂukes, Of Random Events That Divulge Nothing But Their Own Lack Of Purpose.

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

I've Been Asked Several Times Over The Years To Become President, And I've Always Said No, Because I Didn't Want To Give Up All The Time From My Work. The Position Won't Be Open For Another Year, But If They Still Want Me Then, I'll Do It; I'll Speak Out As Often As I Can From That Platform.

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.

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

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.

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'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.

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.

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

But Even The Facts Do Not Always Tell The Truth

Telling The Truth

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.

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.

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

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

"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

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 Don't Have All The Facts. And I Might Misremember. As A Matter Of Fact, After I Finished Winter Journal, I Realized That I'd Gotten Someone's Name Wrong.

I Can Never Say 'why' About Anything I Do. I Suppose I Can Say 'how' And 'when' And 'what.' But 'why' Is Impenetrable To Me.

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

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

Every Historical Moment Needs The Stories To Be Told About It.

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.

In A Sense I Am Able To Interrogate Myself, Address Myself From That Slight Distance And Enter A Kind Of Dialogical Relationship With Myself. Because I'm Saying, "look, These Are Things That Have Happened To Me, But How Odd They Are Or How Ordinary They Are [is Up To The Reader To Decide]."

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.

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.

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.

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

I Think Human Beings Wouldn't Be Human Without Narrative Fiction.

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

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.

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

Just Think It, And Chances Are It Will Happen.

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.

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.

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

Writing Makes You Feel That There Is A Reason To Go On Living. If I Couldn't Write, I Would Stop Breathing.

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're Too Good For This World, And Because Of That The World Will Eventually Crush You.

You Can Look At My Autobiographical Pieces As Source Books... But, You See, My Fiction Doesn't Revolve Around Autobiographical Questions.

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.

Most Of My Friends' Fathers Had Been In The War - Either As Soldiers Or In Some Other Capacity In The Military. Whereas My Father Had Not Fought. He Was Older And He Was In A Business That Was Considered Essential To The Wartime Effort - The Wire Business - And, Of Course, I Was So Young I Didn't Understand Any Of This.

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.

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.

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

I Would Say That Edgar Allan Poe, [georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, And [jorge Luis] Borges Are All Boy-writers. These Are Writers Who Take... A Kind Of Demonic Joy In Writing.

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

Most Of The Boys Would Come With Bits Of Equipment That Their Fathers Had Given Them From Their War Days - Helmets, Canteens, Binoculars, These Kinds Of Things - That Leant A Kind Of Authenticity To The Games We Were Playing. But, Of Course, My Father Never Gave Me Anything. So I Began To Question Him. You Know, Why Don't You Have Anything From The War? And I Think He Was...embarrassed To Tell Me He Hadn't Fought, Because, You Know, Little Boys Want To Turn Their Fathers Into Heroes, And He Didn't Want To Be Diminished In My Eyes.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Farts Come From No One And Nowhere; They Are Anonymous Emanations That Belong To The Group As A Whole, And Even When Every Person In The Room Can Point To The Culprit, The Only Sane Course Of Action Is Denial.

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

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.

Solitary. But Not In The Sense Of Being Alone. Not Solitary In The Way Thoreau Was, For Example, Exiling Himself In Order To Find Out Where He Was; Not Solitary In The Way Jonah Was, Praying For Deliverance In The Belly Of The Whale. Solitary In The Sense Of Retreat. In The Sense Of Not Having To See Himself, Of Not Having To See Himself Being Seen By Anyone Else.

Even When I'm Just Sitting At My Desk, I Have To Get Up Every Twenty Minutes Or So And Walk Around, Walk Around, Walk Around, And Then I Can Go Back To The Page. I Can't Just Sit There For Hours At A Time. Language Comes Out Of The Body As Much As The Mind.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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'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.

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

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

In The Same Way, The World Is Not The Sum Of All The Things That Are In It. It Is The Infinitely Complex Network Of Connections Among Them. As In The Meanings Of Words, Things Take On Meaning Only In Relationship To Each Other.

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

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.

Reading, At The Deepest Level, Is A Physical Experience. Most People Are Not Attuned To This, Most People Don't Learn How To Read - Poetry For Example, Or High-quality Prose. They're Used To Reading Magazines And Newspapers, Which Are Only Of The Mind, But Not Of The Body.

How Can You Think About The World Without Factoring In The Unforseen, The Fluke Event?

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.

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.

This Was The First Time He Had Seriously Confronted What He Was Doing, And The Force Of That Awareness Came Very Abruptly - With A Surging Of His Pulse And A Frantic Pounding In His Head. He Was About To Gamble His Life On That Table, And The Insanity Of That Risk Filled Him With A Kind Of Awe.

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.

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

Memory And The Imagination Are Almost Identical. It's The Same Place In The Brain And The Same Thing Is Happening. When You Think About Your Own Life, There Are No Memories Without Place. You Are Always Situated Somewhere. I Think The Imagination - The Narrative Imagination At Least - Situates You In A Specific Space When You Start To Think Of A Story. I Often Use Places I Know. I Put My Characters Inside Rooms And Houses That I'm Familiar With - Sometimes The Houses Of My Parents Or Grandparents Or Previous Apartments I've Lived In.

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.

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.

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

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.

Fiction Creating Reality.

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

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

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.

I'm In Constant Inner Dialogue With My Father Still.

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.

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.

Holes In The Memory. You Grab On To Some Things, Others Have Completely Disappeared.

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.

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

I Project Myself So Deeply Into The Characters In Novels That I'm Not Thinking About My Own Life.

We Are Continually Shaped By The Forces Of Coincidence.

When The Father Dies, He Writes, The Son Becomes His Own Father And His Own Son. He Looks At Is Son And Sees Himself In The Face Of The Boy. He Imagines What The Boy Sees When He Looks At Him And Finds Himself Becoming His Own Father. Inexplicably, He Is Moved By This. It Is Not Just The Sight Of The Boy That Moves Him, Not Even The Thought Of Standing Inside His Father, But What He Sees In The Boy Of His Own Vanished Past. It Is A Nostalgia For His Own Life That He Feels, Perhaps, A Memory Of His Own Boyhood As A Son To His Father.

My Children Haven't Read 'winter Journal'. They Have Read Some Of My Work, But I Really Don't Foist It On Them. I Want Them To Be Free To Discover It In Their Own Good Time. I Think Reading An Intimate Memoir By Your Father - Or An Intimate Autobiographical Work, Whatever We Want To Call This Thing - You Have To Come At It At The Right Moment, So I'm Certainly Not Foisting It Upon Them.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Always Be Happy

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.

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

The Most Deeply Personal Of My Works Are The Non-fiction Works, The Autobiographical Works, Because There, I'm Talking About Myself Very Directly.

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.

He Would Conclude That Nothing Was Real Except Chance.

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’

One Should Never Underestimate The Power Of Books.

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

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.'

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.

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

It Would Be A Terrible World If Everyone Was An Artist. Nothing Would Get Done!

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

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.

The Pen Will Never Be Able To Move Fast Enough To Write Down Every Word Discovered In The Space Of Memory. Some Things Have Been Lost Forever, Other Things Will Perhaps Be Remembered Again, And Still Other Things Have Been Lost And Found And Lost Again. There Is No Way To Be Sure Of Any This.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Brooklyn Has A Bit Of Everything - Some Of The Most Beautiful Things In America, And Some Of The Most Wretched, Ugly, Impoverished Things.

No One Can Cross The Boundary Into Another -- For The Simple Reason That No One Can Gain Access To Himself

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.

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.

What Better Portrait Of A Writer Than To Show A Man Who Has Been Bewitched By Books?

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.

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

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?

Dismantling The Architecture Of My Discontent

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I Was Always Interested In French Poetry Sort Of As A Sideline To My Own Work, I Was Translating Contemporary French Poets. That Kind Of Spilled Out Into Translation As A Way To Earn Money, Pay For Food And Put Bread On The Table.

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.

When Every Card In The Deck Is Stacked Against You, The Only Way To Win A Hand Is To Break The Rules. You Beg, Borrow, And Steal, As The Old Adage Goes, And If You Happen To Get Caught In The Act, At Least You´ve Gone Down Fighting The Good Fight.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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 Don't Want To Use Quotation Marks Anymore, I've Gone Back And Forth With Them. In Ghosts, I Didn't Use Them, For Instance, All The Way Back In The Early Eighties.

Quotation Marks

The Tone Of Every Book Is Slightly Different; There's A Music That Each Has That Is Distinct From All The Others.

I Know That What's Happened In The Election Has Changed American Reality, And I Understand That I Have To Change With It. I Have To Rethink How I Live My Life. I'm Not A Political Essayist; I Don't See That I Would Have Any Value Cranking Out Articles For Newspapers Or Magazines, Because Lots Of People Are Doing That Already.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

I Like The Sound A Typewriter Makes.

Every Man Is The Author Of His Own Life.

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

I Feel That The Act Of Writing, In And Of Itself, Is A Tool Towards Probing That Which You Wouldn't Without That Pen In Your Hand. It's A Strange, Almost Neurological Phenomenon, And The Words Seem To Generate More Words - But Only When You're Writing. You Can't Do It In Your Head.

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.

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.

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.

We All Want To Believe In Impossible Things, I Suppose, To Persuade Ourselves That Miracles Can Happen.

Impossible Things

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.

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.

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.

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

Writing Is A Solitary Business. It Takes Over Your Life. In Some Sense, A Writer Has No Life Of His Own. Even When He’s There, He’s Not Really There.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

To Tell You The Truth, I'm Not Unhappy About It. I'm Not Even Sure That I Like The Idea Of Adapting Novels Into Films. It's Very Difficult To Do, And It Usually Doesn't Work. There Are Exceptions, But Generally Speaking, One Feels Disappointed With The Result.

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

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

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.

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.

Betty Died Of A Broken Heart. Some People Laugh When They Hear That Phrase, But That's Because They Don't Know Anything About The World. People Die Of Broken Hearts. It Happens Every Day, And It Will Go On Happening To The End Of Time.

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