Paul Auster Quotes

There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.

In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it

It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.

There is a double rhythm in all human beings. We are binary beings - two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Two legs for walking. And the heartbeat thumping in our chest mirrors that.

I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.

The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect.

Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.

I haven't done any translating for decades now. It's something I did when I was young.

[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.

The best filmmakers, I think, have always had very narrow frameworks for their stories, and then they can go deeply, rather than skimming the surface.

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.

The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.

The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.

I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.

[Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer.

You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions.

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.

I don't have all the facts. And I might misremember. As a matter of fact, after I finished Winter Journal, I realized that I'd gotten someone's name wrong.

The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.

I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.

and now we get to the hard part. the endings, the farewells, and the famous last words. if you don't hear from me often, remember that you're in my thoughts.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

When I am writing, even though it's hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I'm not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I'm not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic.

Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!

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.

After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.

Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.

I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.

I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.

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.

I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.

As Siri says, who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true.

Brooklyn has a bit of everything - some of the most beautiful things in America, and some of the most wretched, ugly, impoverished things.

When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.

Just think it, and chances are it will happen.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.

How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesnt believe that, about other possibilities?

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.