Paul Auster Quotes

I can't write a line without music - it provides just the right amount of distraction to keep me focused. Clearly, I still miss the noisy roommates.

I write every day. Most weekdays, I write about ten hours a day. That doesn't mean eight hours of surfing the Net or watching videos on YouTube. I park my butt in a chair and write... I learned that writer's block is a myth created by people who don't have, or understand, a writing process.

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

I'm a writer, not a professional runner. It's fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

At night I can write for hours.

I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.

For a long time, I would write without music, because I thought it was distracting until I appreciated that it actually unlocks a certain unconscious productivity vault in my mind.

When I'm writing, I write every day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is.

My writing life is always a bit disorganized. It's hard for me to get going, but sometimes, once I begin, I go like the wind.

When I finish a book, I get extremely restless; I have to aggressively find ways to occupy myself; going off into the woods alone, doing things that are physically or mentally demanding to keep myself busy until the next big idea comes.

I don't listen to music when I write - I find it distracting.

I've always got a novel under way, but if I try to work on it every day, exclusively, I falter. So I always keep more than one thing going.

I've always found it best to have a routine. I go to my study at the same time every day and climb into my bay window. I may not be inspired every day, but on the days I am, I need to be in place to write. If I'm not particularly inspired, I'll revise or do research or correspondence.

At readings, audience members sometimes ask if I keep writing past the two hours if I'm on a roll, but I don't. I figure that if I'm on a roll, it's partially because I know I'm about to stop.

I'm a fictional monogamist - I can only work on one thing at a time - but each novel starts growing in my head when I'm about midway through the previous novel.

A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.

I'm not very good at writing songs when I have a lot of clutter in my mind.

I never listen to music when I write. It's too much of a distraction.

I write while listening to music, mostly because the world beyond my headphones is too chaotic.

I have read that, when you are writing or working on something creative, and your attention wanders, your brain is processing and working on what you have just done. But I find it hard to believe that my brain is really taking five hours to fully process the seven minutes I have managed to spend focused on one thing.

The space where writing happens is a unique space that's hard to define, and when you're kicked out of it because you're travelling or distracted, it seems so elusive and hard to defend because you yourself doubt whether it existed.

I'm the kind of writer that, once I get into writing mode in my brain, I'm non-stop.

He loved the scratching of pencil against paper when he was focused: it meant something was happening.

Where the heart is the mind works best.

When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.