Paul Auster Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• 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, and then together you make it what it is.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Writing, Common Humanity

• Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Solitary

  Paul Auster (2008). “The New York Trilogy”, p.178, Faber & Faber

• The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

  Paul Auster

  Memories, Moving, Writing

  Paul Auster (2011). “Collected Prose”, p.193, Faber & Faber

• 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 head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

  Paul Auster

  Struggle, Writing, Hands

  "I want to tell you a story" by Paul Auster, www.theguardian.com. November 4, 2006.

• I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Writing, Men

• Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin....Writing as a lesser form of dance.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Body, Sometimes

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

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Novelists, World

  "'I used to feel like people were trampling over me to get to my husband. I had print marks on my body'". Interview with Rachel Cooke, www.theguardian.com. May 24, 2008.

• Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Two, Collaboration

  Paul Auster (2010). “Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations with Artists, and Interviews”, p.460, Macmillan

• 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

  Children, Writing, Ambition

• As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.

  Paul Auster

  Live Life, Book, Writing

  Paul Auster (2008). “The Brooklyn Follies”, p.14, Faber & Faber

• To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

  Paul Auster

  Believe, Book, Writing

  Paul Auster (2008). “The New York Trilogy”, p.225, Faber & Faber

• Writing is, after all, a gesture towards other people, giving something to others. And so it's not a completely hermetic exercise. It's really an opening up.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Exercise, Opening Up

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

• I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore.

  Paul Auster

  Distance, Writing, Different

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

• I don't even own a computer. I write by hand then I type it up on an old manual typewriter. But I cross out a lot - I'm not writing in stone tablets, it's just ink on paper. I don't feel comfortable without a pen or a pencil in my hand. I can't think with my fingers on the keyboard. Words are generated for me by gripping the pen, and pressing the point on the paper.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Thinking, Typewriters

  "A Connoisseur of Clouds, a Meteorologist of Whims: The Rumpus Interview with Paul Auster". Interview with Juliet Linderman, therumpus.net. November 16, 2009.

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

  Paul Auster

  Taken, Writing, Past

  Paul Auster, James M. Hutchisson (2013). “Conversations with Paul Auster”, p.201, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Impulse, Writing Life

  "A Personal 'Report From The Interior' Of Author Paul Auster". "All Things Considered" with Arun Rath, www.npr.org. December 15, 2013.

• While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.

  Paul Auster

  Reading, Writing, School

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 5, 2009.

• In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I've done it, each time I've done it I've felt deeply immersed in the material as I'm doing it, and then it's over and everything is the same.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Done, Facts

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

• Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Winter, Thinking

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy, Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Kind, Certain

  "A Connoisseur of Clouds, a Meteorologist of Whims: The Rumpus Interview with Paul Auster". Interview with Juliet Linderman, therumpus.net. November 16, 2009.

• When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Writing, Character

  "A Connoisseur Of Clouds, A Meteorologist Of Whims". Interview with Juliet Linderman, therumpus.net. November 16, 2009.

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

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Breathing, Goes On

• When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.

  Paul Auster

  Memories, Father, Moving

  Paul Auster (2007). “The Invention of Solitude”, p.102, Penguin

• I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 6, 2008.

• The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Mean, Trying

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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