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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.

-Paul Auster

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Most Of The Boys

Paul Auster

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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.

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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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

You Can Survive Only If Nothing Is Necessary To You

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

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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

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?

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

I Like The Sound A Typewriter Makes.

One Should Never Underestimate The Power Of Books.

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

You Tend To Feel Very Hurt When People Attack You And Feel Indifferent When You Get Praise. You Think, 'of Course They Like It. They Should Like It.'

I Don't Like Pictures In Books. I Feel That The Pictures Diminish The Words, And The Words Diminish The Pictures, And It Doesn't Work.

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

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 Feel Estranged From Language Is To Lose Your Own Body.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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 Had Jumped Off The Edge, And Then, At The Very Last Moment, Something Reached Out And Caught Me In Midair. That Something Is What I Define As Love. It Is The One Thing That Can Stop A Man From Falling, Powerful Enough To Negate The Laws Of Gravity.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Often It's True That Films Just Go Right Through Us. You See The Film, You Might Be Entertained, And If It's Not A Great Film, It Loses Its Power Very Quickly. I Think Even Simply Acceptable Books Stay With Us A Lot Longer.

When 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.

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 Don't Think About The Stories So Much, As The Characters Themselves. They Live On, And They Are Almost As Real As I Am.

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

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.

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.

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

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'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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I've Dealt With Numbers All My Life, Of Course, And After A While You Begin To Feel That Each Number Has A Personality Of Its Own. A Twelve Is Very Different From A Thirteen, For Example. Twelve Is Upright, Conscientious, Intelligent, Whereas Thirteen Is A Loner, A Shady Character Who Won't Think Twice About Breaking The Law To Get What He Wants. Eleven Is Tough, An Outdoorsman Who Likes Tramping Through Woods And Scaling Mountains; Ten Is Rather Simpleminded, A Bland Figure Who Always Does What He's Told; Nine Is Deep And Mystical, A Buddha Of Contemplation.

I 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 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

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

Feet On The Ground

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

But Even The Facts Do Not Always Tell The Truth

Telling The Truth

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

I 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.

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.

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

Dismantling The Architecture Of My Discontent

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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."

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

"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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Every Man Is The Author Of His Own Life.

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.

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

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.

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.

Paintings. Or The Collapse Of Time In Images.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Always Be Happy

Everything Can Change At Any Moment, Suddenly And Forever.

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.

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

Impossible Things

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’

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

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