Paul Auster Quotes About Fathers

Quotes about: Fathers

• When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.

  Paul Auster

  Memories, Father, Moving

  Paul Auster (2007). “The Invention of Solitude”, p.102, Penguin

• I'm in constant inner dialogue with my father still.

  Paul Auster

  Father, Dialogue, Constant

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

• I say at the very end of "Winter Journal" that I do dream about my father often. I think I have a tremendous compassion for him, which has grown over the years. A certain kind of pity for him also in that he was so unrealised as a human being, so dogged, and so shut-off from people in many ways. You know, I've been writing another book, and it's another non-fiction autobiographical work, kind of a compliment to "Winter Journal", and it's just finished.

  Paul Auster

  Dream, Father, Book

  Interview with Wayne Gooderham, www.timeout.com.

• Most of my friends' fathers had been in the war - either as soldiers or in some other capacity in the military. Whereas my father had not fought. He was older and he was in a business that was considered essential to the wartime effort - the wire business - and, of course, I was so young I didn't understand any of this.

  Paul Auster

  Father, Military, War

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

• Most of the boys would come with bits of equipment that their fathers had given them from their war days - helmets, canteens, binoculars, these kinds of things - that leant a kind of authenticity to the games we were playing. But, of course, my father never gave me anything. So I began to question him. You know, Why don't you have anything from the war? And I think he was...embarrassed to tell me he hadn't fought, because, you know, little boys want to turn their fathers into heroes, and he didn't want to be diminished in my eyes.

  Paul Auster

  Father, War, Hero

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

• When I look back at experience [with my father], all I can do is feel pity. You know, how torn he was about how to act, what to say. And it seems an important story to me.

  Paul Auster

  Father, Important, Looks

  Interview with Wayne Gooderham, www.timeout.com.

• 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

• Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.

  Paul Auster

  Mother, Father, Book

  "I want to tell you a story" by Paul Auster, www.theguardian.com. November 4, 2006.

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