Paul Auster Quotes

If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?

You can make a thousand different movies about the same subject.

One of the reasons I never had a problem handing over my characters to other creators is that I knew that they would add their own influences and takes on the characters and make them better for it.

I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.

If you take a really good book, then the potential is for a really good film. But you've got to get it right.

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

You know how when you read a book and it becomes a movie, and it's different than you pictured? In some ways, acting is a lot like that.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

As a novelist, you have to realise that the novel and the film have to live separate lives. They're just different, like your kids, even if they look alike.

Story is the primary factor any day. If I believe that a particular director would do justice to it, I will accept an offer.

It's better if a singer disconnects from the original and brings something new to the version.

When you got source material, whether it's a play or a book - a great writer often appreciates being adapted and developed. It's like when you go see a production of a great play and they are always different. There is always room for interpretation.

Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

I think the characters are supposed to be an open book, blank canvas.

You can make anything into a play for the simple reason that the human mind is one of the best writers in the business. So, if you've got a writer who's clever enough to give you enough clues, you will fill out every blank spot in a play, every single one.

I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.

The object of art is to give life shape.

I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.

I look at the film without any music or sound. I try to grasp the story from the screenplay. I try to write to the novel or book if there is one. I try to create music that's honest and true to my heart for the story.

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

Like poetry, fashion does not state anything. It merely suggests.

These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music.

But of works of art little can be said.

It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.