Paul Auster Quotes

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.

I got a couple of stories published, but the kind of money you were making for publishing a short story, I could see I wasn't going to make a living at it.

When I was a child, there was very little money, so I've always been concerned for my financial security, which has meant that finding myself as a writer was a bad move. The practical difference the money has made is that I can support myself by fiction. That is what I have been trying to do throughout my life.

Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.

I don't have good business sense. You never get much money for the arts. But I like independence. I like to grow.

I've always been able to survive by writing, though.

It is easy to be independent when you've got money. But to be independent when you haven't got a thing, that's the Lord's test.

I tell young people who ask me about a future in writing not to go into it unless they get married to someone rich.

Fortunately, now I've got myself in a position where things are about story and not money. In my earlier career, it was more about getting my foot in the door and to get enough money to live, to be perfectly honest.

I didn't think we would ever make enough money to pay rent by playing music.

I don't need a lot of money. Simplicity is the answer for me.

You don't become a poet if you want to make any money.

I never took creative writing.

I'm fortunate in having journalism as a sideline to pay the bills, and I essentially do it in order to take as long as I want with books.

I was pushing for a career in poetry and of course the received wisdom was that you would never make a living at it.

I moved to California in 2011 to be a writer. A family friend told me to take acting classes so I could do commercials and actually make a little money.

I write, but I don't write poetry. I don't rhyme or anything like that.

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

I used to write poems more when I was younger, but I haven't in a long time. I just write ideas and paragraphs and go from there.

She’d majored in English, hoping that meant she could spend the next four years reading and writing. And maybe the next four years after that.

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.

The spotlight was on me. I pretended it wasn't, but it was, and for every wrong reason. It was all about money, it was all about my supposed competition with Joe Eszterhas over who'd be the highest-paid screenwriter. I didn't care. I just wanted to write stories, try to become a better writer, improve my style, change genres, even try new things. I didn't like action so much any more.

But, because my private lectures and domestic pupils are a great hinderance and intteruption of my studies, I wish to live entirely exempt from the former, and in great measure from the latter. ... in short, I should wish to gain my bread from my writings.