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"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.

-Paul Auster

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"the Weird World Rolls

Paul Auster

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"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.

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Falling In Love

More From Paul Auster

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.

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 Woke Up One Day And Thought: I Want To Write A Book About The History Of My Body. I Could Justify Talking About My Mother Because It Was In Her Body That My Body Began.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Feet On The Ground

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.'

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

A Book, At The Same Time, Also Has To Do With What I Call A Buzz In The Head. It's A Certain Kind Of Music That I Start Hearing. It's The Music Of The Language, But It's Also The Music Of The Story. I Have To Live With That Music For A While Before I Can Put Any Words On The Page. I Think That's Because I Have To Get My Body As Much As My Mind Accustomed To The Music Of Writing That Particular Book. It Really Is A Mysterious Feeling.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I Don't 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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

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

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.

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

I Don't 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.

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

There's A Difference Between Doing Memoir And Writing A Novel. If I Had Put The Story Of The Boy Killing My Dog - And That Was Eric Also, What A Little Monster He Was! - In A Novel, Even If I Took It Directly From Life, It Would Be Fiction.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

The Best Filmmakers, I Think, Have Always Had Very Narrow Frameworks For Their Stories, And Then They Can Go Deeply, Rather Than Skimming The Surface.

I See Myself As Anybody, As Everybody; I'm Not Just Telling The Story Of My Life To Give The Reader A Picture Of Who I Am.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Impossible Things

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 Still Believe We Wasted A Golden Opportunity To Make Significant Changes In Our Country. I Think People In America Would Have Been Ready And Willing To Do It, But The Bush Administration Took A Kind Of Simplistic, Almost Moronic Approach To It, All Because People Were So Afraid.

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

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 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]."

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

I've Been 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I'm Generous. I Give Good Tips. It's Just - The Way I Live My Life, Ironically Enough, Is: I Don't Want Anything. I'm Not A Consumer. I Don't Crave Objects.

We Hear Things, But We Can't Always See Them, Or, Even If We Do See Them, We're Not Sure That We're Seeing Correctly. Hence: Invisible.

We 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 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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everything Can Change At Any Moment, Suddenly And Forever.

You Can Survive Only If Nothing Is Necessary To You

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.

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'm In Constant Inner Dialogue With My Father Still.

Having Made Films, I Know Very Well That The Scope Of The Average 90- To 120-minute Movie Is About The Same Narrative Heft As A Long Short Story Or A Novella.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

We Are Continually Shaped By The Forces Of Coincidence.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

There 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reason And Memory Are Nearly Always At Odds.

I Know The Pleasure You Get From Making Your Films. The Intense Involvement In Every Aspect: The Acting, The Camera, The Colors, The Costumes, Even The Hair And Makeup. Editing Is Thrilling. Everything To Do With Films Is Absorbing - Everything But The Money Part, The Business. But I'm Deeply Glad I've Had That Experience.

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

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

I 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.

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

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

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

The Truth Of The Story Lies In The Details.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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 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

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.

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

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 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.

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 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.

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