Top 50 Paul Auster Quotes

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn’t know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I’m worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That’s always first.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

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 it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

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.

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.

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

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

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.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

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

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

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

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

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

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

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

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

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

I think if we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

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.

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

It’s extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can’t get a job on a ship unless you have seaman’s paper’s, and you can’t get seaman’s papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me.

Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people – more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true – in certain rare, isolated cases.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

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.

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 say, then they have to go.

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.

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

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.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

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

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.’

I’m generous. I give good tips. It’s just – the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don’t want anything. I’m not a consumer. I don’t crave objects.

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

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

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

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.

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 are.

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 first person, then the narrator is a writer.

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.

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

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.

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

I’ve always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil – especially for corrections.

If you’re not ready for everything, you’re not ready for anything.