Paul Auster Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• One should never underestimate the power of books.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Underestimate, Should

  Paul Auster (2008). “The Brooklyn Follies”, p.193, Faber & Faber

• 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

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

  Paul Auster

  Book, Writing, Men

• Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

  Paul Auster

  Book, Men, Years

  Paul Auster (2011). “Collected Prose”, p.188, Faber & Faber

• Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.

  Paul Auster

  Children, Book, Bridges

• Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Exercise, Escaping

  Paul Auster (2016). “Collected Novels Volume Four”, p.102, Faber & Faber

• 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

• The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Mean, Men

• 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

• 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

  Book, Interesting, Film

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

  Paul Auster

  Book, Mean, Experiments

  "American dreams". Interview with Hadley Freeman, www.theguardian.com. October 26, 2002.

• 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.

  Paul Auster

  Mother, Book, Writing

• Actually, screenplays were much more detailed than what I did in the book In the book I had to invent a style for communicating what the sensation of looking at a film would be, whereas the screenplays I wrote in Paris were actual blueprints for how to do the film, with every gesture, every little movement noted in exhaustive detail.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Paris, Style

• As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Writing, Challenges

  Paul Auster, James M. Hutchisson (2013). “Conversations with Paul Auster”, p.199, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Passion, Film And Television

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

• You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Looks, Stuff

  Interview with Leonard Pierce, www.avclub.com. November 09, 2010.

• I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I'm writing long sentences now, something I didn't use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Writing, Sunset

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

• I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Scared, Teach

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

• Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a writer writes can excite the imagination and the feelings of the reader, then that reader carries it around forever. Nothing is more vivid than good fiction.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Writing, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Book, Writing, World

• Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Years, Giving

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

• You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Looks, Fiction

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

• The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Different, Tone

  Paul Auster, James M. Hutchisson (2013). “Conversations with Paul Auster”, p.199, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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

  Book, Reading, Punishment

  "The mighty Quinn" by James Campbell, www.theguardian.com. November 12, 2005.

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