Paul Auster Country Quotations

I think it's a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

The funny thing is, as a young person I was trying to write prose, and I wrote a lot of it, but I was never satisfied with the results. Two of the novels I wound up finishing and publishing later I started very early on, in my early 20's, In The Country Of Last Things and Moon Palace. Both of those books I worked a great deal on but never quite got a grip on either one.

I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the [George W.] Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.

I can remember saying again and again and again, "A terrible thing has happened, but this should be a kind of wake-up call for our country, and we have a great opportunity now to reinvent ourselves. To rethink our position about oil and energy, to rethink our relationship with other cultures and other countries, and why other people want to attack us."

Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?