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. Paul Auster More Quotes by Paul Auster More Quotes From Paul Auster I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away. Paul Auster memoir use wanted 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. Paul Auster quotation-marks use gone 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. Paul Auster sunset writing book Fiction creating reality. Paul Auster creating reality fiction 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? Paul Auster paris distance new-york 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. Paul Auster punishment novelists book 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. Paul Auster giving people thinking 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. Paul Auster girl baseball book 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. Paul Auster phrases book thinking 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. Paul Auster understanding goal writing 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. Paul Auster mind writing character 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. Paul Auster real character thinking 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. Paul Auster funny-things space interesting I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months. Paul Auster taken book years 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. Paul Auster want book needs 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. Paul Auster writing winter thinking As Siri says, who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true. Paul Auster emotion memories thinking 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. Paul Auster distance different writing The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect. Paul Auster importance emotional remember 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. Paul Auster names winter might
