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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.

-Paul Auster

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Films And Television And

Paul Auster

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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.

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Film And Television

More From Paul Auster

Then, Without Any Warning, We Both Straightened Up, Turned Towards Each Other, And Began To Kiss. After That, It Is Difficult For Me To Speak Of What Happened. Such Things Have Little To Do With Words, So Little, In Fact, That It Seems Almost Pointless To Try To Express Them. If Anything, I Would Say That We Were Falling Into Each Other, That We Were Falling So Fast And So Far That Nothing Could Catch Us.

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

History Is Present In All My Novels. And Whether I Am Directly Talking About The Sociological Moment Or Just Immersing My Character In The Environment, I Am Very Aware Of It.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Just Think It, And Chances Are It Will Happen.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Wounds Are An Essential Part Of Life, And Until You Are Wounded In Some Way, You Cannot Become A Man.

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.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

Always Be Happy

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.

What I'm Trying To Do [in Winter Journal] Is To Tell The Story Of A Man's Life From Birth, But There Are Different Versions Of Him, Four Different Versions.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I Write Different Kinds Of Sentences, Depending On What The Book Is, And What The Project Is. I See My Work Evolving. I'm Writing Long Sentences Now, Something I Didn't Use To Do. I Had Some Kind Of Breakthrough, Five Or Six Years Ago, In Invisible, And In Sunset Park After That. I Discovered A New Way To Write Sentences. And I Find It Exhilarating.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Money, Of Course, Is Never Just Money. It's Always Something Else, And It's Always Something More, And It Always Has The Last Word.

Dismantling The Architecture Of My Discontent

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

We Find Ourselves Only By Looking To What We’re Not.

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

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

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.

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.

Writing Begins In The Body, It Is The Music Of The Body, And Even If The Words Have Meaning, Can Sometimes Have Meaning, The Music Of The Words Is Where The Meanings Begin....writing As A Lesser Form Of Dance.

I'm Really Trying To Dredge Up What One Might Call Intellectual And Moral Material. For Example, When Do You Realize That You Are An American? What Age Does That Happen To You? When Do You Realize What Religion Your Parents Practice? When Does It All Become Conscious? I Was Interested In Exploring All Of That.

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

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

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.

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.

Late Style Gets Simpler And Shorter, And Here, I'm Getting More Abundant As I Get Older!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What If I Had Been Born During A War And I Lived In An Occupied City, And People Were Being Taken Out And Shot Every Day? Everything Would Be Different - Even After The War Ended, My Future Would Be Very Different. Look At What These Poor People In Aleppo Are Going Through. The Children, The Ones Who Survive, Are Going To Be Absolutely Altered By What They Live Through, And You And I, Luckily, Have Never Had To Deal With That.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Everything Can Change At Any Moment, Suddenly And Forever.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

But Even The Facts Do Not Always Tell The Truth

Telling The Truth

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 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.

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.

The Truth Of The Story Lies In The Details.

I Feel I'm Discovering Something New, A Different Rhythm, And I Guess These Rhythms Have A Lot To Do With Walking, Too, But It's A Longer Trajectory Now. I'm Traveling Greater Distances With Each Sentence. But I Don't Write About Walking That Much Anymore.

In The Old Physics, Three Times Two Equals Six And Two Times Three Equals 6 Are Reversible Propositions. Not In Quantum Physics. Three Times Two And Two Times Three Are Two Different Matters, Distinct And Separate Propositions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

How Is It Possible For Someone Who Believes That The World Was Created In Six Days To Have A Rational Conversation With Me, Who Doesnt Believe That, About Other Possibilities?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Every Man Is The Author Of His Own Life.

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 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.

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.

We Are Continually Shaped By The Forces Of Coincidence.

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

Translators Are The Shadow Heroes Of Literature, The Often Forgotten Instruments That Make It Possible For Different Cultures To Talk To One Another, Who Have Enabled Us To Understand That We All, From Every Part Of The World, Live In One World.

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

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

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.

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.

Libraries Aren't In The Real World, After All. They're Places Apart, Sanctuaries Of Pure Thought. In This Way I Can Go On Living On The Moon For The Rest Of My Life.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

He Would Conclude That Nothing Was Real Except Chance.

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.

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

My Characters, I Find Them As I'm Writing. It's Quite Incredible How Fully Realized They Are In My Mind, How Many Details I Know About Each Of Them.

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

When A Person Is Lucky Enough To Live Inside A Story, To Live Inside An Imaginary World, The Pains Of This World Disappear. For As Long As The Story Goes On, Reality No Longer Exists.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I Like The Sound A Typewriter Makes.

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

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.

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

Impossible Things

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.

Just The Fact That Hilary Clinton Won The Popular Vote By Such A Large Number Gives Some Validation To The Impulse To Stand Firm. If We Don't, I Think Within A Year Administration Is Pretty Much Going To Dismantle American Society As We've Known It. I'm Not Sure That We're Able To Stop It From Happening, But I Don't Think People Should Just Roll Over And Passively Watch It Happen.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

All My Novels Are Very Much Directly Related To My Inner Life, Even Though I'm Inventing Characters, Even Though It's Fiction, Even Though It's Make-believe, It Nevertheless Is Coming Out Of The Deepest Recesses Of Myself.

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.

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.

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

We Exist For Ourselves, Perhaps, And At Times We Even Have A Glimmer Of Who We Are, But In The End We Can Never Be Sure, And As Our Lives Go On, We Become More And More Opaque To Ourselves, More And More Aware Of Our Own Incoherence. No One Can Cross The Boundary Into Another – For The Simple Reason That No One Can Gain Access To Himself.

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.

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.

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.

I Can Remember Saying Again And Again And Again, "a Terrible Thing Has Happened, But This Should Be A Kind Of Wake-up Call For Our Country, And We Have A Great Opportunity Now To Reinvent Ourselves. To Rethink Our Position About Oil And Energy, To Rethink Our Relationship With Other Cultures And Other Countries, And Why Other People Want To Attack Us."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Those Of Us Who Can Remember Our Childhoods Will Recall How Ardently We Relished The Moment Of The Bedtime Story, When Our Mother Or Father Would Sit Down Beside Us In The Semi-dark And Read From A Book Of Fairy Tales.

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

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

Feet On The Ground

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 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.

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

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.

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