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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.

-Paul Auster

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To Tell You The

Paul Auster

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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.

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

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

For Example, When I Was Writing Leviathan, Which Was Written Both In New York And In Vermont - I Think There Were Two Summers In Vermont, In That House I Wrote About In Winter Journal, That Broken-down House... I Was Working In An Out-building, A Kind Of Shack, A Tumble-down, Broken-down Mess Of A Place, And I Had A Green Table. I Just Thought, "well, Is There A Way To Bring My Life Into The Fiction I'm Writing, Will It Make A Difference?" And The Fact Is, It Doesn't Make Any Difference. It Was A Kind Of Experiment Which Couldn't Fail.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Bodies Count, Of Course - They Count More Than We're Willing To Admit - But We Don't Fall In Love With Bodies, We Fall In Love With Each Other. We All Know That, But The Moment We Go Beyond A Catalogue Of Surface Qualities And Appearances, Words Begin To Fail Us, To Crumble Apart In Mystical Confusions And Cloudy, Unsubstantial Metaphors.

Falling In Love

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I Thought, "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.

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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Impossible Things

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

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.

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

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

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’

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

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.

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

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

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

You Can Survive Only If Nothing Is Necessary To You

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.

Paintings. Or The Collapse Of Time In Images.

Fiction Creating Reality.

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.

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

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

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.

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'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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

Films And Television And Even Comic Books Are Churning Out Vast Quantities Of Fictional Narratives, And The Public Continues To Swallow Them Up With Great Passion. That Is Because Human Beings Need Stories.

Film And Television

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.

Stories Only Happen To Those Who Are Able To Tell Them.

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.

My Wife Is My First Reader, My First Line Of Defence I Suppose. So She Says, "oh Well, Oh Yes, It's All True." At The Same Time, I Could Have Written Much More About Us, But I Didn't Want To Go Any Further. I Did Cut Things Out. There Are Certain Things That I Wrote About Her That Are So Gushing With Praise And Admiration That When I Looked At Those Passages I Realised They Would Be Ridiculous To Anybody Else.

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

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.

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 Human Beings Wouldn't Be Human Without Narrative Fiction.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

We Are Continually Shaped By The Forces Of Coincidence.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 Beyond The Grasp Of Anyone's Memory To Recall Conversations In Kind Of [memoir] Detail. So It's Fake. It's All Made Up.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 Like The Sound A Typewriter Makes.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.'

Everything Can Change At Any Moment, Suddenly And Forever.

Reason And Memory Are Nearly Always At Odds.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It Always Stimulates Me To Discover New Examples Of My Own Prejudice And Stupidity, To Realize That I Don't Know Half As Much As I Think I Do.

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

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

Feet On The Ground

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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

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

He Would Conclude That Nothing Was Real Except Chance.

I Have To Say In Premise 'winter Journal' Is Really Not A Memoir. And I Don't Even Think Of It As An Autobiography. I Think Of It As A Literary Composition - Similar To Music - Composed Of Autobiographical Fragments. I'm Really Not Telling The Story Of My Life In A Coherent Narrative Form.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Always Be Happy

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

I 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

There Are Certain Phrases In Books Of Mine, And I Don't Know Where They Came From, Or How I Was Capable Of Thinking Up These Formulations. It's Only In The Heat Of Composition That These Things Occur To You.

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