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While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.
Paul Auster -
A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.
Paul Auster
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You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
Paul Auster -
Bodies count, of course - they count more than we're willing to admit - but we don't fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other. We all know that, but the moment we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, unsubstantial metaphors.
Paul Auster -
you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you
Paul Auster -
We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
Paul Auster -
I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it's been a very split kind of response.
Paul Auster -
The truth of the story lies in the details.
Paul Auster
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[Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer.
Paul Auster -
Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.
Paul Auster -
There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.
Paul Auster -
Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.
Paul Auster -
I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.
Paul Auster -
Money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.
Paul Auster
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Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin....Writing as a lesser form of dance.
Paul Auster -
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."
Paul Auster -
I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.
Paul Auster -
People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle.
Paul Auster -
All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
Paul Auster -
I think people are trying out ideas with the new technology and it's too early to say where it's going exactly. But again, whether it's digital or paper, it doesn't matter. It's words that somebody is reading and getting an experience out of that reading. That's all that really matters.
Paul Auster
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For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.
Paul Auster -
What if I had been born during a war and I lived in an occupied city, and people were being taken out and shot every day? Everything would be different - even after the war ended, my future would be very different. Look at what these poor people in Aleppo are going through. The children, the ones who survive, are going to be absolutely altered by what they live through, and you and I, luckily, have never had to deal with that.
Paul Auster -
Every man is the author of his own life.
Paul Auster -
Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.
Paul Auster