Paul Auster Quotes About Memoir

Quotes about: Memoir

• 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.

  Paul Auster

  Children, Father, Reading

  Source: www.timeout.com

• 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

  Use, Memoir, Wanted

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy, Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

• 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

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy, Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

• I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.

  Paul Auster

  Winter, Thinking, Stories

  Time Out Interview, www.timeout.com.

• It's an ethical pact I've made with myself and with the reader - not to invent. And when I can't remember, I say I can't remember. I'm just appalled by the memoirs published by people who regurgitate dialogue, conversations from when they were small children, and they go on for three or four pages. I can't even remember what we said to each other ten minutes ago! How can I remember what was said sixty years ago? It's not possible.

  Paul Auster

  Children, Years, People

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

• When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word "memoir" on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.

  Paul Auster

  Independent, Winter, America

  Interview with Wayne Gooderham, www.timeout.com.

• There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.

  Paul Auster

  Dog, Writing, Boys

  "An Interview with Paul Auster". Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

• Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Years, Giving

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

• It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.

  Paul Auster

  Memories, Fake, Details

  Time Out Interview, www.timeout.com.

• 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.

  Paul Auster

  Thinking, Remember, Conversation

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

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