The author of The New York Trilogy, Leviathan and 4 3 2 1 has died at the age of 77. Here are some of the most memorable quotes from interviews he gave throughout his life
• Paul Auster, American author of The New York Trilogy, dies aged 77
I’ve always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil – especially for corrections. 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. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.
Only a person who really felt compelled to do it would shut himself up in a room every day … When I think about the alternatives – how beautiful life can be, how interesting – I think it’s a crazy way to live your life.
The excitement, the struggle, is emboldening and vivifying. I just feel more alive writing.
You can never achieve what you hope to achieve. You can come close sometimes and others may appreciate your work, but you, the author, will always feel you’ve failed. You know you’ve done your best, but your best isn’t good enough. Maybe that’s why you keep writing. So you can fail a little better the next time.
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 … That’s how it begins. 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.
‘Postmodern’ is a term I don’t understand … there’s an arrogance to all this labelling, a self-assurance that I find to be distasteful, if not dishonest. I try to be humble in the face of my own confusions, and I don’t want to elevate my doubts to some status they don’t deserve. I’m really stumbling. I’m really in the dark. I don’t know. And if that – what I would call honesty – qualifies as postmodern, then OK, but it’s not as if I ever wanted to write a book that sounded like John Barth or Robert Coover.
I think a moment comes at around the age of about five or six when you have a thought and become capable of telling yourself, simultaneously, that you are thinking that thought. This doubling occurs when we begin to reflect on our own thinking. Once you can do that, you are able to tell the story of yourself to yourself. We all have a continuous, unbroken narrative within ourselves about who we are, and we go on telling it every day of our lives.
Some people are able to tell a more or less truthful story about themselves. Others are fantasists. Their sense of who they are is so at odds with what the rest of the world feels about them that they become pathetic … Then, there’s the other extreme, the people who diminish themselves in their own minds. They’re often much greater people than they think they are and, often, much admired by others. Still, they kill themselves inside. Almost by definition, the good are hard on themselves – and the less than good believe they’re the best.
Human beings are imponderable, they can rarely be captured in words. If you open yourself up to all the different aspects of a person, you are usually left in a state of befuddlement.
(When asked about a moment when a boy standing next to him at a summer camp was killed by a lightning strike.) It was the seminal experience of my life. At 14 everything you go through is deep. You are a work-in-progress. But being right next to a boy who was essentially murdered by the gods changed my whole view of the world. I had assumed that the little bourgeois comforts of my life in postwar suburban New Jersey had a kind of order. And then I realised that nothing had that sort of order. I’ve lived with that thought ever since. It’s chilling, but also liberating.
People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.
