-
It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
Paul Auster -
The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be sympathetic and read each word carefully and understand what I'm writing about. I suppose every writer feels this.
Paul Auster
-
When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.
Paul Auster -
Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.
Paul Auster -
The childhood scenes [ in The Tree of Life] are tremendous. My favorite moment is when the mother levitate - for three seconds. Of course, this is how a child thinks of his mother.
Paul Auster -
I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
Paul Auster -
The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
Paul Auster -
The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.
Paul Auster
-
In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.
Paul Auster -
I thought, "Well, I'm writing about early childhood, so maybe it would make sense to write about late childhood as well, early adulthood." Those were my thoughts, and this was how this crazy book [Winter Journal] was composed. I've never seen a book with pictures like at the end, pictures related to things you've read before.
Paul Auster -
I'm not a boy-writer, I've never been. I wanted to be a boy-writer when I was young, and I think that held me back. I wanted to be very clever, and funny, but I'm not very clever and not terribly funny. I've finally accepted my limits, and I do what I can do.
Paul Auster -
I've been asked several times over the years to become president, and I've always said no, because I didn't want to give up all the time from my work. The position won't be open for another year, but if they still want me then, I'll do it; I'll speak out as often as I can from that platform.
Paul Auster -
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.
Paul Auster -
For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail.
Paul Auster
-
We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.
Paul Auster -
You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.
Paul Auster -
I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.
Paul Auster -
I hate reading digital books. I don't enjoy the experience. I like smelling the paper, turning the pages. I think the book as we've always known it is an efficient technology.
Paul Auster -
Fiction creating reality.
Paul Auster -
I know the pleasure you get from making your films. The intense involvement in every aspect: the acting, the camera, the colors, the costumes, even the hair and makeup. Editing is thrilling. Everything to do with films is absorbing - everything but the money part, the business. But I'm deeply glad I've had that experience.
Paul Auster
-
And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.
Paul Auster -
I know that what's happened in the election has changed American reality, and I understand that I have to change with it. I have to rethink how I live my life. I'm not a political essayist; I don't see that I would have any value cranking out articles for newspapers or magazines, because lots of people are doing that already.
Paul Auster -
We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.
Paul Auster -
We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.
Paul Auster