Paul Auster (photo by Jerry Bauer)

Jonathan Lethem talks with Paul Auster: an interesting, insightful conversation with Paul Auster, one of my favourite contemporary writers. Published in the February 2005 issue of The Believer, this informal chat between two writers covers lots of different topics, and as a writer myself, I wholeheartedly agree with Auster when he says:

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind. I write in longhand, and the pen is scratching the words onto the page. I can even hear the words being written. So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I’m hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be. That music is a physical force. Not only do you write books physically, but you read books physically as well. There’s something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies. An attentive reader is finding meanings in the book that can’t be articulated, finding them in his or her body. I think this is what so many people don’t understand about fiction. Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don’t understand prose. They’re so used to reading journalism—clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information—facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

(Via my friend Mario Rizzi.)