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

All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

Paul Auster

Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.

Paul Auster

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all - most of us, anyway - want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

Paul Auster

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

Paul Auster

People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.

Paul Auster

Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do...

Paul Auster

You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either.

Paul Auster

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

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 guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, an...

Paul Auster

I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.

Paul Auster

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Paul Auster

Human beings need stories, and we're looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it's television, whether it's comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

Paul Auster

I don't know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn't hurt the book.

Paul Auster

I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.

Paul Auster

In my studio, it is unkempt and unattractive. Once I'm in my work, I don't notice where I am.

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