Paul Auster Quotes

I can't help moving my face - reacting - when I watch a movie, because I'm really inhabiting a character. I know this is weird, but it demonstrates what I love about cinema: it allows you to live a different life, to have a different experience, to disappear for two hours. I think it's wonderful.

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

You need to be able to climb into a narrative and zip it up under your chin. You need to be able to see through the eyes of the hero, smell what he's smelling, hear what he's hearing.

When I look back at many of the moments of wonder, awe, or terror that I've got from science fiction, it's often been because I've been put in the head of one of the characters.

When I read a character that I really, really love, I know immediately what they look like. It's like I want to 100 percent become that person.

We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had.

Part of the allure of watching characters on-screen is to be able to put yourself in his or her shoes or to be able to relate to what he or she is going through or what he or she is thinking.

I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.

You live vicariously through your characters.

I liked playing video games because I felt like I was inside of the story in a way that I didn't feel when I was just watching something. Any chance I could get to step into the shoes of another person, I would take. I couldn't get enough of stories.

Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.

When I read, I don't need a character to look like me, act like me, or think like me. I don't need to have my heart broken. I don't need to be surprised or amused or challenged, and I don't need to swoon.

It's fun to play a character that you can identify with.

We all have a lot of people inside us, yet we get to live only one life. Fiction lets us slip into someone else’s skin, so to speak. That’s why we read novels, and also why we write them - to experience more life, through imagination.

I always find myself gravitating to the analogy of a maze. Think of film noir and if you picture the story as a maze, you don't want to be hanging above the maze watching the characters make the wrong choices because it's frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with them, making the turns at their side, that keeps it more exciting...I quite like to be in that maze.

As an actor you bring some of your own experiences which can make things easier. You build off of it, but your imagination is always the best thing you have as far as creating things I think specifically for what that character is going through. But you're definitely drawing obviously upon things that you can connect to, and then you kind of mold the change that you're making into something that's right for the character.

A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

The power of movies lies in the fact that it enables the viewer to enter the reality, to some extent, of the characters.

It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.

I write to be the characters that I am not.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

I think there's a bit of me in every character. Basically it just depends on what happens with the character.

I think you always need to be able to relate to your characters, but that doesn't necessarily mean...you have to understand why they do what they do, but you don't actually have to be like that yourself.

I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain.

I think in a lot of ways, writing, when you're really in there, is like being an actress because you're in somebody else's head.