Paul Auster Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life.
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I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don't make my living writing science fiction, so in that sense, I'm still not a pro.
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The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.
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I like writing flawed women, and being one, it's something I feel I can write with some veracity and authority.
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We need to accept that consumption is not the end goal of our life and stop measuring our well-being simply on the basis of earnings. We need to explicitly take the quality of our work-related life into account in judging our well-being.
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Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.
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I don't have specific music for when I'm writing. I'm usually listening to the same playlist or 'artist' before I arrive at the computer as when I'm walking somewhere after leaving the computer.
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My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.
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I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.
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Quality that significantly exceeds the customer's expectations doesn't seem to pay off. This 'delight the customer' stuff isn't rewarding. One has to be careful about delighting customers too often, because it sort of reshapes customer expectations.
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Writing is a creative process, and you need to have the doors and windows of your mind open so that you have the possibility of change.
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Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.
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Because I find writing painful, I try to get it over with as fast as possible. But I write every day, or I lose the thread.
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I love writing songs. I love doing my radio show and talking to the fans and listening to what they have to say, but there's a certain responsibility that comes along with being given the gift of music. I take that seriously, but at the same time I try to use it to do something that makes a difference in a positive way.
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The morning is always my best time of the day for writing because that's when my head is best.
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I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that.
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I'm disregarding all the rules I've seen as people approach writing music. I'm trying to break them.
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I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.
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The best way to achieve surprise quality is by avoiding cliches.
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We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.
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For years I'd thought my color was black: deep, dark, thoughtful, mysterious. Black, you can hide behind. But now I know it is red.
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At the beginning of every week, I like to sit down and figure out what I'm going to make. I probably try at least two new recipes a week. But I have my standbys - jambalaya, meatloaf and mashed potatoes.
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I must say that, beyond occasionally exposing me to laughter, my constitutional shyness has been no dis-advantage whatever. In fact I can see that, on the contrary, it has been all to my advantage.
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Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.
