Quotes by Paul Auster

About Paul Auster:

Paul Benjamin Auster is an American author and director whose writing blends absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), and The Brooklyn Follies (2005). His books are translated to more than forty languages.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to sa...

Paul Auster

Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.

Paul Auster

Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.

Paul Auster

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

With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.

Paul Auster

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

Paul Auster

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

Paul Auster

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

Paul Auster

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.

Paul Auster

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

Paul Auster

I really have no interest in myself.

Paul Auster

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

Paul Auster

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

Paul Auster

I can never say 'why' about anything I do. I suppose I can say 'how' and 'when' and 'what.' But 'why' is impenetrable to me.

Paul Auster

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

Paul Auster

The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy.

Paul Auster

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.

Paul Auster

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

Paul Auster

What keeps me up at night? Anxiety. Anxiety, the inability to go to sleep, it's quite literally that.

Paul Auster

I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

Paul Auster

You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, 'Of course they like it. They should like it.'

Paul Auster

Author Bio

  • NamePaul Auster
  • Descriptionnovelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter
  • BornFebruary 3, 1947
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionScreenwriter; Film Director; Linguist; Translator; Novelist; Poet; Essayist; Writer
  • AwardsCommandeur Des Arts Et Des Lettres?; Prince Of Asturia Literary Prize