Paul Auster Quotes

When I first started writing, a friend said I should be careful because I'm letting people know how to reach right in and play with my workings. And they do!

For me, all the materials and objects I employ come from a specific space that's very personal.

There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

You know, it's hard sometimes to just detach yourself from what you're doing.

I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.

Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don't want people to know.

We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects. You can actually figure out before you work on something how much blood you will have to let emotionally.

Most artists don't understand what they do, and I don't think we have to. Other people do that better - they understand what I do better than I do!

It feels like your subconscious can be way ahead of you, as a songwriter. You can write a song that you think is about one thing and months later you're playing it and thinking, hang on, this is completely informing where I am now.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

I don't like talking too much about my personal life, but it all goes into my work.

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.

I think subconsciously or selfishly I knew that I was supposed to do something. It was like a thumping or a throbbing saying, "Yes, this what you've been waiting for." But you're a little dim to those spiritual thoughts when you're dumb like me. So I did have to get a little bit of a kick. I played it for a bunch of people and I think their reactions were warm and deep enough that they gave me the courage to get [the record] out there.

I don't want to deconstruct what I do.

People who leave their own time out of their work cannot be surprised if their time fails to find them interesting.

When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

When I'm traveling to promote my book, I feel like an artful impostor. What I really am is when I'm in my (painter's) studio and when I'm writing. With actors, it's the same thing. They're kind of artful impostors in public. When you get to know them, they're different people.

It's always been most important for me to figure out "my space" rather than trying to check out what everyone else is up to, minute by minute. Technology is making it easier to connect to other people, but maybe harder to keep connected to yourself-- and that's essential for any artist, I think.

I take making music seriously, but you have to have a sense of humor about yourself. I invite people into my life. That's how I do it.

I love making pictures but I don't like talking about them.

I do feel like a fraud a lot of the time because I've never been interested in people who say 'I'm a writer', 'I'm an artist'. Too much is made of the role and not enough of the work. We are such a celebrity-driven age and a status-driven age, that the status becomes more important than the actual work.

Nobody tells people who are beginners - and I really wish somebody had told this to me - that all of us who do creative work... get into it because we have good taste.