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 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.

• 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

• 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

  Reading, Writing, Detectives

  "Big Think Interview With Paul Auster". Interviewed with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 5, 2009.

• 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

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

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Trying, Fiction

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

• There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.

  Paul Auster

  Dog, Writing, Boys

  "An Interview with Paul Auster". Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

• I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Answers, Compulsion

  Paul Auster, James M. Hutchisson (2013). “Conversations with Paul Auster”, p.200, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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

• 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

  Writing, Next Day, Waiting

  "Paul Auster talks" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. October 29, 2008.

• I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Order, Found

  Interview with Jonathan Lethem, www.believermag.com. February 2005.

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