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

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

Paul Auster

I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It's coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don't even know where they ar...

Paul Auster

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the ...

Paul Auster

Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for t...

Paul Auster

How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesn't believe that, about other possibilities?

Paul Auster

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admire...

Paul Auster

I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

Paul Auster

No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.

Paul Auster

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.

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, an...

Paul Auster

The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives.

Paul Auster

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life

Paul Auster

My French was neither good nor bad. I had enough to understand what people said to me, but speaking was difficult, and there were times when no words came to my lips, when I struggled to say even the simplest things. There was a certain pleasure in t...

Paul Auster

No es que escribir me produzca un gran placer, pero es mucho peor si no lo hago.

Paul Auster

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your he...

Paul Auster

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.

Paul Auster

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

Paul Auster

but even the facts do not always tell the truth

Paul Auster

nadie hace nada en esta vida sin alguien que crea en él

Paul Auster

This is what is called speaking. I believe that is the term. When words come out, fly into the air, live for a moment, and die. Strange, is it not? I myself have no opinion. No and no again. But still, there are words you will need to have. There are...

Paul Auster

I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me.

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