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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.
-Paul Auster
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We Are All Aliens

Paul Auster
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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.

Understanding the Quote: "we are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense..."

This quote by Paul Auster reflects deeply on the theme of eye. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Eye, Who We Are, Aliens, 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 eye and who we are. 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
Eye
Who We Are
Aliens
More From Paul Auster
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
I Never Feel I'm Standing On Solid Ground, And I Do Write With A Certain Kind Of Trembling Fear.
Writing
Kind
Certain
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.
Book
Writing
Sunset
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.
Practice
Parent
Intellectual
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 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
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
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
The Story Is Not In The Words; It's In The Struggle.
Struggle
Stories
I Think That's What Turns Young Men And Women Into Writers - The Happiness You Discover Living In Books.
Book
Writing
Men
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
There's Love, And Certainly Children You Care About More Than Yourself. But Nevertheless, We're Alone In Our Heads.
Children
Care
Nevertheless
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.
Thinking
People
Giving
Life Is Deeply Tragic And Also Very Comic At The Same Time. It's Everything At Once.
Life Is
Comic
Tragic
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.
Summer
New York
Writing
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.
Reality
People
Political
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
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.
Appreciation
Art
Thinking
But Even The Facts Do Not Always Tell The Truth
Facts
Telling The Truth
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
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
There's Hope For Everyone. That's What Makes The World Go Round.
Reality
World
Plaits
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.
Thinking
Stories
Skimming
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.
Running
Mean
Trying
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
Every Historical Moment Needs The Stories To Be Told About It.
Historical
Needs
Stories
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.
Average
Long
Stories
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
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
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.
Writing
Thinking
Typewriters
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.
Effort
Understanding
World
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
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
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.
Beautiful
Art
Struggle
People Who Don't Like My Work Say That The Connections Seem Too Arbitrary. But That's How Life Is.
People
Connections
Arbitrary
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
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
It Often Happens That Things Are Other Than What They Seem, And You Can Get Yourself Into Trouble By Jumping To Conclusions.
Jumping
Trouble
Conclusion
The Kind Of Fiction I'm Trying To Write Is About Telling The Truth.
Writing
Trying
Fiction
I Project Myself So Deeply Into The Characters In Novels That I'm Not Thinking About My Own Life.
Character
Thinking
Projects
We Find Ourselves Only By Looking To What We’re Not.
Every Man Is The Author Of His Own Life.
Men
Every Man
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
Cities - I'm Attracted To Them, And I Have A Special Attachment To New York...it's My Place.
New York
Attachment
Cities
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 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 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
Memory Is The Space In Which A Thing Happens For A Second Time.
Memories
Space
Happens
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
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
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
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
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
He Slipped Away Slowly, Withdrawing From This World By Small, Imperceptible Degrees, And In The End It Was As If He Were A Drop Of Water Evaporating In The Sun, Shrinking And Shrinking Until At Last He Wasn’t There Anymore.
Water
Degrees
Shrinking
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
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
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.
Reality
Trying
Elements
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
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
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.
Memories
Moving
Writing
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
Confusion
Quality
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
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
As Siri Says, Who Is Deeply Involved With Neuroscience, Emotion Consolidates Memory, And I Think That's True.
Memories
Thinking
Emotion
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
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
You Can Look At My Autobiographical Pieces As Source Books... But, You See, My Fiction Doesn't Revolve Around Autobiographical Questions.
Book
Looks
Fiction
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
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
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
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.
Thinking
Remember
Conversation
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.
Science
Two
Different
As Long As You Are Dreaming, There Is Always A Way Out
Dream
Long
Way
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.
Believe
Character
Fiction
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.
Writing
Character
Mind
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
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
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
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.
Who I Am
Giving
Stories
You Have To Really Have A Taste For Being Alone To Be A Writer.
When A Person Is Lucky Enough To Live Inside A Story, To Live Inside An Imaginary World, The Pains Of This World Disappear. For As Long As The Story Goes On, Reality No Longer Exists.
Life
Pain
Reality
What Better Portrait Of A Writer Than To Show A Man Who Has Been Bewitched By Books?
Book
Men
Portraits
There Are Often References To Childhood, But They're Rarely The Focus Of The [my] Novels.
Focus
Childhood
Novel
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
The Joke Is The Purest, Most Essential Form Of Storytelling. Every Word Has To Count.
Essentials
Storytelling
Form
You Can't Put Your Feet On The Ground Until You've Touched The Sky.
Sky
Feet
Feet On The Ground
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
Nobody Asks You To Do This. The World Out There Is Not Panting After Another Novelist. We Choose It
Writing
Novelists
World
How Can You Think About The World Without Factoring In The Unforseen, The Fluke Event?
Thinking
Events
World
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
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
When You're Young, You Keep Reading New Writers And You Keep Changing Your Mind About How You Ought To Sound.
Reading
Mind
Sound
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 Things We Remember Are Often Things That Have Great Emotional Importance, And So They Have A Lasting Effect.
Emotional
Remember
Importance
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
The Biggest Book For Me, When I Was Fifteen, Was Crime And Punishment, Which I Read In A Kind Of Fever. When I Put It Down, I Thought, If This Is What Novels Are Then I Want To Be A Novelist.
Book
Punishment
Novelists
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.
Reality
People
Personality
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
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.
Mother
Father
Book
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 Never Would Have Thought Of That Word, "hospitality." I Settle Into The Rhythm Of My Steps.
Steps
Hospitality
Settling
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
I Guess The Toughest Things In Translations Are Word Play, Which Can Never Be Reproduced Exactly.
Play
Translations
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
After Something Crystallizes, I Can Write Ferociously And Write Novels In Six Months, Which In The Past Would Have Taken Me Two Years.
Taken
Writing
Past
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
No One Was To Blame For What Happened, But That Does Not Make It Any Less Difficult To Accept. It Was All A Matter Of Missed Connections, Bad Timing, Blundering In The Dark. We Were Always In The Right Place At The Wrong Time, The Wrong Place At The Right Time, Always Just Missing Each Other, Always Just A Few Inches From Figuring The Whole Thing Out. That's What The Story Boils Down To, I Think. A Series Of Lost Chances. All The Pieces Were There From The Beginning, But No One Knew How To Put Them Together.
Dark
Thinking
Missing
I Was Always Interested In French Poetry Sort Of As A Sideline To My Own Work, I Was Translating Contemporary French Poets. That Kind Of Spilled Out Into Translation As A Way To Earn Money, Pay For Food And Put Bread On The Table.
Tables
Pay
Way
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
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
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
Every Generation Always Thinks It Was Better Before, And I Think People Have Been Saying This For Probably Thousands Of Years.
Thinking
Years
People
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
No One Can Cross The Boundary Into Another -- For The Simple Reason That No One Can Gain Access To Himself
Simple
Opaque
Gains
We Have Missed Him In The Sunshine, In The Storm, In The Twilight, Ever Since.
Twilight
Sunshine
Storm
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.
Space
Funny Things
Interesting
If You're Not Ready For Everything, You're Not Ready For Anything.
Ready
Not Ready
Ifs
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
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
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
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
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
I Don't Like That Word [memoir]. Whenever My Publishers Have Wanted To Use It, I've Told Them To Take It Away.
Use
Memoir
Wanted
[charles] Reznikoff Was In Between Faiths, In Between Worlds... A Double, Hyphenated American. I Think It Probably Goes Deeper Than That.
Thinking
World
Deeper
As Long As There's One Person To Believe It, There's No Story That Can't Be True.
Believe
Long
Stories
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
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
The Truth Of The Story Lies In The Details.
Lying
Details
Stories
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.
Believe
Ideas
People
What Matters Is Not How Well You Can Avoid Trouble, But How You Cope With Trouble When It Comes.
What Matters
Matter
Trouble
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
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.
Long
Trying
Done
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
[lev] Tolstoy Is Not A Boy-writer. He's A Grown-up. And [fedor] Doestoeivski Is Not A Boy-writer.
Boys
Lev Tolstoy
You Can Survive Only If Nothing Is Necessary To You
Ifs
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
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
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.
Writing
Next Day
Waiting
Just Think It, And Chances Are It Will Happen.
Thinking
Chance
Chances Are
Some Things Get Written More Quickly Than Others, But I Can't Really Measure Degrees Of Difficulty.
Degrees
Difficulty
Written
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.
Way
Happens
Dies
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
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'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
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
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
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.
Cities
Outsiders
Walks
The Real Is Always Way Ahead Of What We Can Imagine.
Real
Way
Imagine
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
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.
Mother
Children
Thinking
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
Reason And Memory Are Nearly Always At Odds.
Memories
Odds
Reason
He Would Conclude That Nothing Was Real Except Chance.
Real
Chance
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
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
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.
Live Life
Book
Writing
Fiction Creating Reality.
Reality
Creating
Fiction
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
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
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
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
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
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 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 Had Made An Empirical Discovery And It Carried All The Weight Of A Mathematical Proof.
Science
Discovery
Weight
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
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.
Children
Book
Bridges
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
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 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.
Writing
Boys
Joy
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?
New York
Distance
Paris
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
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
Dismantling The Architecture Of My Discontent
Architecture
Discontent
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
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 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.
Reading
Writing
Detectives
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
We All Want To Believe In Impossible Things, I Suppose, To Persuade Ourselves That Miracles Can Happen.
Believe
Impossible Things
Miracle
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
Something Happens, Blue Thinks, And Then It Goes On Happening Forever. It Can Never Be Changed, Can Never Be Otherwise.
Thinking
Blue
Forever
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
Books Demand More. You Have To Be A More Active Participant.
Book
Demand
Active
One Should Never Underestimate The Power Of Books.
Book
Underestimate
Should
I'm In Constant Inner Dialogue With My Father Still.
Father
Dialogue
Constant
"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
Morning
Children
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.
Country
War
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
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 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.
Mother
Book
Writing
You Find The Book In The Process Of Doing It. That's The Adventure Of The Job.
Jobs
Book
Adventure
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.
Age
Different
Way
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
You Think It Will Never Happen To You, That It Cannot Happen To You, That You Are The Only Person In The World To Whom None Of These Things Will Ever Happen, And Then, One By One, They All Begin To Happen To You, In The Same Way They Happen To Everyone Else.
Thinking
World
Way
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