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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.

-Paul Auster

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I Wanted To Do

Paul Auster

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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.

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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.

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 Like That Word [memoir]. Whenever My Publishers Have Wanted To Use It, I've Told Them To Take It Away.

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

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

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 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.

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.

I Do Not Repeat Conversations That I Can't Remember. And It's Something That Irritates Me A Great Deal, Because I Think Most Memoirs Are False Novels.

I'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I'm Not A Boy-writer, I've Never Been. I Wanted To Be A Boy-writer When I Was Young, And I Think That Held Me Back. I Wanted To Be Very Clever, And Funny, But I'm Not Very Clever And Not Terribly Funny. I've Finally Accepted My Limits, And I Do What I Can Do.

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

I Think Most Writers Can't Really Think About Their Work Without A Kind Of Revulsion. And I Think That's Probably Why We Keep Going Back And Trying Again, Trying To Do Better Each Time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

In Other Words: It Seems To Me That I Will Always Be Happy In The Place Where I Am Not. Or, More Bluntly: Wherever I Am Not Is The Place Where I Am Myself. Or Else, Taking The Bull By The Horns: Anywhere Out Of The World.

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.

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.

Paintings. Or The Collapse Of Time In Images.

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

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

Art Is Not Politics. The Glory Of The Novel Is That In Its Essence, It Is A Democratic Form, Because It Treats Individuals As Worthy Of Scrutiny. That Alone Is A Kind Of Political Act. A Good Novel About A Tea Party Of Rich Women Can Be Just As Galvanizing And Important To The Soul As War And Peace, So I Think It's Not Really The Job Of Artists To Do Anything. They Can Have Their Opinions As Private Citizens, But They Must Continue Making Their Art.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

But Even The Facts Do Not Always Tell The Truth

Telling The Truth

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.

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 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.'

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]."

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every Man Is The Author Of His Own Life.

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

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’

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 Guess The Important Thing For Young Writers Is To Read.

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.

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

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.

There Are Often References To Childhood, But They're Rarely The Focus Of The [my] Novels.

And That's Why Books Are Never Going To Die. It's Impossible. It's The Only Time We Really Go Into The Mind Of A Stranger, And We Find Our Common Humanity Doing This. So The Book Doesn't Only Belong To The Writer, It Belongs To The Reader As Well, And Then Together You Make It What It Is.

Common Humanity

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

The Moon People Do Not Eat By Swallowing Food But By Smelling It. Their Money Is Poetry - Actual Poems, Written Out On Pieces Of Paper Whose Value Is Determined By The Worth Of The Poem Itself.

To Feel Estranged From Language Is To Lose Your Own Body.

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.

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.

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 Like The Sound A Typewriter Makes.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

What Matters Is Not How Well You Can Avoid Trouble, But How You Cope With Trouble When It Comes.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Impossible Things

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

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

In My Books, There Are A Lot Of People Stuck In Rooms. Or, Conversely, Out In The Wide Open. It Seems That, In A Funny Way, When People Are Cooped Up In Rooms They Are Freer Than When They Are Wandering About In The World.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I Write The Paragraph, Then I'm Crossing Out, Changing Words, Trying To Improve It. When It Seems More Or Less Ok, Then I Type It Up Because Sometimes It's Almost Illegible, And If I Wait, I Might Not Be Able To Read It The Next Day.

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.

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

It's Always A Mystery To Me, I Have To Confess. I've Never Been Able To Witness The Birth Of An Idea. It Seems As If One Second, There's Nothing Particularly Going On, And The Next Second, Something Is There.

I Believe That Every Artist, In One Way Or Another, Is A Wounded Person. It's Not Natural To Make Art.

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.

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.

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.

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

In General, Lives Seem To Veer Abruptly From One Thing To Another, To Jostle And Bump, To Squirm. A Person Heads In One Direction, Turns Sharply In Mid-course, Stalls, Drifts, Starts Up Again. Nothing Is Ever Known, And Inevitably We Come To A Place Quite Different From The One We Set Out For.

It Became A Habit Of Mine Never To Leave The House Without A Pencil In My Pocket.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Reason And Memory Are Nearly Always At Odds.

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?

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

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.

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.

We Are Left With Nothing But Death, The Irreducible Fact Of Our Own Mortality. Death After A Long Illness We Can Accept With Resignation. Even Accidental Death We Can Ascribe To Fate. But For A Man To Die Of No Apparent Cause, For A Man To Die Simply Because He Is A Man, Brings Us So Close To The Invisible Boundary Between Life And Death That We No Longer Know Which Side We Are On. Life Becomes Death, And It Is As If This Death Has Owned This Life All Along. Death Without Warning. Which Is To Say: Life Stops. And It Can Stop At Any Moment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Always Be Happy

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."

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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