Paul Auster, The Art of Fiction, Paris Review, 2003: “Books are born out of ignorance, and go on living only to the degree that they cannot be understood”

“As a young person, I would always ask myself, Where are the words coming from? Who’s saying this? The third-person narrative…there’s an eerie, disembodied quality to that voice. It seems to come from nowhere and I found that disturbing.”

“When you were fourteen years old…the boy next to you was struck by lightning and killed.”

“That incident changed my life, there’s no question about it.”

“Was I some kind of freak or was reality truly as strange and incomprehensible as I thought it was?”

“I felt as if I was writing in a trance.”

    “In Leviathan, your narrator Peter Aaron writes: ‘No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after the are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood.’ How close is that to your own belief?

    “I rarely speak directly through my characters. They might resemble me at times, or borrow aspects of my life, but I tend to think of them as autonomous beings with their own opinions and their own ways of expressing themselves. But in this case Aaron’s opinion matches my own.”