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.
Paul AusterI 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 AusterThe tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.
Paul AusterFor the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms โsuccessโ and โfailureโ 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 oneโs 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.
Paul AusterAutobiographical 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