L.A. Paul Quotes

I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it's been a very split kind of response.

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

Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.

But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.

Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.

We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.

I'm generous. I give good tips. It's just - the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don't want anything. I'm not a consumer. I don't crave objects.

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

It's a mind going over things, revisiting things, maybe trying to refine the original perception. You have to keep going a thing over in order to make sense off it.

Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.

Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.

I can never say 'why' about anything I do. I suppose I can say 'how' and 'when' and 'what.' But 'why' is impenetrable to me.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

...once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.

It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.

What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.

I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.

I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.

Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.

I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don't even have a computer, I don't have a cell phone.

I didn't even know how to shave at 15.

I'm really interested in being a player. I'm not pursuing TV at all. If TV pursues me, that's different. I don't even want to entertain it. I think that helps me as a player.

Payne Stewart was a vicious competitor. He only played to win, ... Only God can change hearts.

It is one of the ironies of biographical art that some details are more relevant than others, and many details have no relevance at all.

Jeffrey Lewis sings as though absurdity were truth, and truth absurdity. And I think I agree with him.

I never wanted to start a band to sound like Nirvana.

I got the chess bug when I was finishing high school, we were doing chess tournaments at my house. I never got to a very high level.

I've... learned that it's a hell of a lot easier to just build something than to try to convince somebody who doesn't believe it's possible.

Name ten thousand reasons why you never want to die, go and tell someone who might've forgotten. Try to list the endless reasons why it's good to be alive, and then just smile for a while about them.

It's so hard to say what you really mean. For any number of reasons: to protect yourself, or if you just can't find the words.

Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

In The Sellout I tried to capture how we can talk and see race, how we see urbanity, and how we see our history.

I think everybody focuses on race, but it's about a ton of things, and I just see these things as all interrelated and all interwoven in a weird way.

I think, and a lot of that has to do with where I grew up in California; [status] isn't something I think about that much.

Contradictions make people feel off. They'll say, "Hey, you just said this and now this person is doing that, how is that possible?"

It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.

Like when you have the right title for something you're writing and you get lost - you can always go back to the title and go, "Yeah, that's what this is about."

There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.

I've also never written anything really in LA.

My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.

I remember going to see Amiri Baraka. It wasn't actually too long before he died. He said, "You've got to write to change the world!" I was like, "Not me, no, no, no, no."

The anger and fear are so global. And of course, we live where we live and there's a hierarchy to who is worth what. It's been going on for a long, long time.

The Sellout is about friends and relatives who have touched me in real ways.