Wit & Attitude Quote by Paul Auster

Art, for Auster, is a custodial job with a built-in identity crisis. The line yanks you into the unglamorous reality of creative life: what you make is instantly vulnerable to the appetites of other people, institutions, and markets. “Protect it” signals a moral obligation to the work itself, not just to reputation. The threat isn’t simple theft; it’s dilution, misuse, or a flattening into something “demoralizing” - a word that implies spiritual sabotage as much as bad taste. He’s not only worried about incompetence (“any stupid person”), but about the way power can reroute meaning: an editor sanding down edges, a producer extracting plot and discarding ambiguity, a brand turning a private vision into public wallpaper.

Then he complicates the posture with a second, quieter admission: control is also a kind of artistic dead end. The tension is the point. Auster’s fiction is famously preoccupied with chance, misreading, and the way stories slip their authors. So the subtext here is less “artist versus idiots” than “artist versus inevitability.” The work will be interpreted, repurposed, and partially misunderstood; that’s not corruption, that’s what culture does.

Contextually, this sounds like an author speaking from the long middle of a career - after the first thrill of being read, when adaptation offers, permissions, and “opportunities” arrive with their hidden costs. It’s a pragmatic ethic: defend the core, accept the drift, and don’t confuse guarding meaning with owning it.