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

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

Understanding the Quote: "the most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the..."

This quote by Paul Auster reflects deeply on the theme of talking. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Talking, Fiction, Non Fiction, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Paul Auster interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Paul Auster

Paul Auster is celebrated for insightful thoughts on talking and fiction. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Talking
Fiction
Non Fiction
More From Paul Auster
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.
Writing
Winter
Thinking
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.
Memories
Character
Thinking
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.
Stories
Feels
Compelling
Artists Are The People For Whom The World Is Not Enough.
Artist
People
World
I Never Experiment With Anything In My Books. Experimentation Means You Don't Know What You're Doing.
Book
Mean
Experiments
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.
Breathing
Paris
America
You Can Survive Only If Nothing Is Necessary To You
Ifs
Fiction Creating Reality.
Reality
Creating
Fiction
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.
Children
Father
Reading
I Think There Might Be Some Pressure Released While I'm Doing Autobiographical Work, But Afterwards Everything Remains The Same.
Thinking
Might
Pressure
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.
Fighting
Winning
Hands
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.
Lasts
Last Words
Courses
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.
Girl
Baseball
Book
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.
Groups
Denial
Rooms
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.
Girl
New York
Nice
The Pictures Do Not Lie, But Neither Do They Tell The Whole Story. They Are Merely A Record Of Time Passing, The Outward Evidence.
Photography
Lying
Stories
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.
Events
Purpose
Facts
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.
Real
Character
Thinking
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.
Mean
Thinking
Stories
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.
Writing
Exercise
Opening Up
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.
Father
Important
Looks
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.
Writing
Solitary
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.
Reading
Men
Important
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.
Writing
Paper
Shy
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.
Beautiful
Reading
Choices
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.
Mean
Forever
Stories
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.
Thinking
Age
Stories
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.
War
Fighting
Boys
I Barely Can Go Shopping For Clothes. I Find It Difficult To Walk Into Stores. The Whole Thing Bores Me So Much.
Shopping
Clothes
Stores
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.
Hate
Book
Reading
I Think Human Beings Wouldn't Be Human Without Narrative Fiction.
Thinking
Fiction
Narrative
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.
Pieces
Literature
Dry
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.
Honesty
People
Resentment
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.
Book
Looks
Stuff
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.
Men
Feelings
Guilt
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.
Book
Writing
Thinking
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.
Life
Bulls
World
Dismantling The Architecture Of My Discontent
Architecture
Discontent
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.
Children
Writing
Ambition
In Invisible There's A Lot About Childhood, The Death Of The Brother And Then The Relationship Between The Brother And Sister.
Brother
Childhood
Brothers And Sisters
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.
Book
Writing
People
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.
Wall
Thinking
Lazy
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.
Gambling
Insanity
Risk
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.
Powerful
Fall
Men
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.
Reading
Thinking
Technology
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.
Memories
Father
Moving
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
Life
Hands
Ideas
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.
Giving
Want
Way
The Story Is Not In The Words; It's In The Struggle.
Struggle
Stories
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.
Talking
People
Interesting
Let Me Tell You, There's No Better Medicine Than A Friendly Card Game For Sloughing Off The Cares Of A Workaday World.
Games
Medicine
Friendly
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.
Mean
Two
Nuts
Every Historical Moment Needs The Stories To Be Told About It.
Historical
Needs
Stories
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.
Order
Perception
Mind
Paintings. Or The Collapse Of Time In Images.
Painting
Collapse
The Tone Of Every Book Is Slightly Different; There's A Music That Each Has That Is Distinct From All The Others.
Book
Different
Tone
When You're Young, You Keep Reading New Writers And You Keep Changing Your Mind About How You Ought To Sound.
Reading
Mind
Sound
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.
Jobs
Break Through
Circles
I've Written Books That Have Taken Me Fifteen Years, From First Sentence To Last, And Some That Only Take Three Or Four Months.
Book
Taken
Years
I Guess The Toughest Things In Translations Are Word Play, Which Can Never Be Reproduced Exactly.
Play
Translations
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.
Invisible
Not Sure
Seeing
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.
Fall
Kissing
Trying
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.
Careers
Doctors
Long
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.
Eye
Who We Are
Aliens
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.
Book
Needs
Want
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.
Heart
People
Broken
But Lost Chances Are As Much A Part Of Life As Chances Taken, And A Story Cannot Dwell On What Might Have Been.
Taken
Stories
Might
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.
Christian
Mean
Artist
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.
Farewell
Lasts
Remember
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.
Book
Writing
Common Humanity
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.
Thinking
Trying
Kind
As My Friend George Oppen Once Said To Me About Getting Old: What A Strange Thing To Happen To A Little Boy.
Boys
Littles
Strange
As Siri Says, Who Is Deeply Involved With Neuroscience, Emotion Consolidates Memory, And I Think That's True.
Memories
Thinking
Emotion
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.
Book
Scared
Teach
You Can Look At My Autobiographical Pieces As Source Books... But, You See, My Fiction Doesn't Revolve Around Autobiographical Questions.
Book
Looks
Fiction
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.
Children
War
Taken
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.
Struggle
Writing
Hands
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.
Book
Exercise
Escaping
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.
Night
Wrong Number
Voice
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.
Notebook
Hands
Events
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.
Book
Writing
Thinking
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.
Writing
People
Giving
I'm In Constant Inner Dialogue With My Father Still.
Father
Dialogue
Constant
Reason And Memory Are Nearly Always At Odds.
Memories
Odds
Reason
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.
Years
People
Want
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.
New York
Home
Together
[lev] Tolstoy Is Not A Boy-writer. He's A Grown-up. And [fedor] Doestoeivski Is Not A Boy-writer.
Boys
Lev Tolstoy
Everything Can Change At Any Moment, Suddenly And Forever.
Reality
Forever
Moments
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.
Beautiful
Writing
Mind
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.
Character
Math
Intelligent
To Leave The World A Little Better Than You Found It. That's The Best A Man Can Ever Do.
Men
Toasters
World
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.
Book
Thinking
Might
If The World Weren't Such A Beautiful Place, We Might All Turn Into Cynics
Beautiful
World
Might
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.
Men
Hands
Soul
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.
Writing
Done
Facts
Life Is Deeply Tragic And Also Very Comic At The Same Time. It's Everything At Once.
Life Is
Comic
Tragic
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.
Art
Book
Past
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.
Integrity
Shapes
Lines
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.
Writing
Hands
Tools
To Feel Estranged From Language Is To Lose Your Own Body.
Body
Language
Feels
The Joke Is The Purest, Most Essential Form Of Storytelling. Every Word Has To Count.
Essentials
Storytelling
Form
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.
Passionate
Littles
Reason
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.
One Direction
Different
Bumps
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.
Believe
Book
Writing
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.
Book
Passion
Film And Television
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.
Writing
Age
Faces
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.
Cutting
Wife
Lines
What Matters Is Not How Well You Can Avoid Trouble, But How You Cope With Trouble When It Comes.
What Matters
Matter
Trouble
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.
Character
Funny Things
Feels
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.
Moon
People
Swallowing
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.
Simple
Goes On
Opaque
[charles] Reznikoff Was In Between Faiths, In Between Worlds... A Double, Hyphenated American. I Think It Probably Goes Deeper Than That.
Thinking
World
Deeper
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.
Book
Paris
Style
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.
Eye
Thinking
People
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.
Dream
Father
Book
Late Style Gets Simpler And Shorter, And Here, I'm Getting More Abundant As I Get Older!
Style
I Haven't Done Any Translating For Decades Now. It's Something I Did When I Was Young.
Done
Young
Translate
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.
Blessed
Luck
Second Marriage
There Are Often References To Childhood, But They're Rarely The Focus Of The [my] Novels.
Focus
Childhood
Novel
I Feel Now, In My Impending Old Age, Very Lucky. I Just Can't Tell You How Lucky I Feel, That I've Managed To First Of All, Stay Alive This Long, In Reasonably Good Health, And That I've Been Able To Do What I Want To Do.
Long
Age
Firsts
As Long As There's One Person To Believe It, There's No Story That Can't Be True.
Believe
Long
Stories
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.
Thinking
Talking
Care
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.'
Hurt
Thinking
People
All Men Contain Several Men Inside Them, And Most Of Us Bounce From One Self To Another Without Ever Knowing Who We Are.
Men
Self
Knowing
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.
Real
Moon
Library
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.
Mind
Twenties
Sitting
We All Want To Believe In Impossible Things, I Suppose, To Persuade Ourselves That Miracles Can Happen.
Believe
Impossible Things
Miracle
Novels Are Fictions And Therefore They Tell Lies, But Through Those Lies Every Novelist Attempts To Tell The Truth About The World.
Lying
Novelists
Fiction
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.
Needs
Use
Want
Brooklyn Has A Bit Of Everything - Some Of The Most Beautiful Things In America, And Some Of The Most Wretched, Ugly, Impoverished Things.
Beautiful
America
Brooklyn
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.
Mean
Live Your Life
Solitude
Cities - I'm Attracted To Them, And I Have A Special Attachment To New York...it's My Place.
New York
Attachment
Cities
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.
Clever
Boys
Thinking
Writing Has Always Had A Tactile Quality For Me. It's A Physical Experience.
Writing
Quality
Tactile
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.'
Book
Reading
Punishment
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?
Believe
World
Six
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.
Father
War
Hero
Money's Important. Everyone Cares About Money. And When You Don't Have Money, Money Becomes The Overriding Obsession Of Your Life.
Important
Care
Obsession
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.
Writing
Goal
Understanding
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.
Writing
Mean
Trying
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.
Reading
Writing
School
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.
Book
Feels
Diminish
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.
Art
War
Thinking
We Have Missed Him In The Sunshine, In The Storm, In The Twilight, Ever Since.
Twilight
Sunshine
Storm
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.
Mean
Thinking
Life Is
The Things We Remember Are Often Things That Have Great Emotional Importance, And So They Have A Lasting Effect.
Emotional
Remember
Importance
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.
Gone
Lasts
Waste
Memory Is The Space In Which A Thing Happens For A Second Time.
Memories
Space
Happens
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.
Thinking
Boys
Feet
To Tell You The Truth, I'm Not Unhappy About It. I'm Not Even Sure That I Like The Idea Of Adapting Novels Into Films. It's Very Difficult To Do, And It Usually Doesn't Work. There Are Exceptions, But Generally Speaking, One Feels Disappointed With The Result.
Ideas
Unhappy
Film
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’
Memories
Men
Mirrors
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.
Book
Writing
Character
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.
Order
Whales
Example
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.
Dog
Writing
Boys
We Are Continually Shaped By The Forces Of Coincidence.
Coincidence
Force
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?
Country
Care
West
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."
Country
Opportunity
Other Cultures
Just Think It, And Chances Are It Will Happen.
Thinking
Chance
Chances Are
I've Found That Writing Novels Is An All-absorbing Experience - Both Physical And Mental - And I Have To Do It Every Day In Order To Keep The Rhythm, To Keep Myself Focused On What I'm Doing.
Writing
Order
Found
I Project Myself So Deeply Into The Characters In Novels That I'm Not Thinking About My Own Life.
Character
Thinking
Projects
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.
Heart
Eye
Mirrors
There's Hope For Everyone. That's What Makes The World Go Round.
Reality
World
Plaits
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.
Artist
Doors
Other Worlds
I Have Difficulty Orienting Myself In Space, And I'm Probably One Of The Few People Who Gets Lost In Manhattan.
Space
People
Manhattan
It Would Be A Terrible World If Everyone Was An Artist. Nothing Would Get Done!
Artist
Would Be
Done
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.
Eye
Army
Please Me
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.
Winter
Names
Might
The Most Challenging Project I've Ever Done, I Think, Is Every Single Thing I've Ever Tried To Do. It's Never Easy.
Thinking
Challenges
Done
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.
Thinking
Stupidity
Example
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.
Ideas
Able
Next
We Find Ourselves Only By Looking To What We’re Not.
But Even The Facts Do Not Always Tell The Truth
Facts
Telling The Truth
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.
Book
Writing
Challenges
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.
New York
June
Trying
I Walk Around The World Like A Ghost, And Sometimes I Question Whether I Even Exist. Whether I've Ever Existed At All.
World
Ghost
Sometimes
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]."
Distance
Ordinary
Looks
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.
Makeup
Acting
Film
As Long As You Are Dreaming, There Is Always A Way Out
Dream
Long
Way
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.
Book
Interesting
Film
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
Men
Solitude
Matter
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.
Father
Military
War
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.
Writing
Doe
Firsts
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.
Self
Stories
Next
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.
Connections
World
Way
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.
Real
Character
Thinking
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.
Thinking
People
Worry
The Most Deeply Personal Of My Works Are The Non-fiction Works, The Autobiographical Works, Because There, I'm Talking About Myself Very Directly.
Talking
Fiction
Non Fiction
I Like The Sound A Typewriter Makes.
Typewriters
Sound
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
Littles
Facts
Stories Only Happen To Those Who Are Able To Tell Them.
Stories
Able
Happens
I Guess The Important Thing For Young Writers Is To Read.
Important
Young Writers
Young
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 Can
I Think That's What Turns Young Men And Women Into Writers - The Happiness You Discover Living In Books.
Book
Writing
Men
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.
Men
Decision
Solitude
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.
Book
Unique
Done
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.
Giving Up
President
Speak
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.
Thinking
Feet
Fancy
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
World
Want
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.
Fate
Men
Long
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.
Stories
Able
Way
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