I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.
— Paul Auster
Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.
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.
All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy.
Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it's a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can't separate persona from psyche; you just can't do it.
If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I've never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.
You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.
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.
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.
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.
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 think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
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.
I think it's a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.
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 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.
No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.
Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.
There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.
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.
You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
I 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.
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.
We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all - most of us, anyway - want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.
When I'm writing, I don't feel neurotic. So it's better for the family if I'm working.
I really have no interest in myself.
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.
Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.
I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
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.
With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.
I've always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil - especially for corrections.
If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
I don't know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn't hurt the book.
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.
It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me.
I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.
