Paul Auster Quotes

I like the physical action of writing down by hand, and I don't just use it for writing my fiction.

I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India.

I write everything with fountain pens. I don't know why. I've done it since I was bar mitzvahed. I was given a fountain pen, a Parker fountain pen, and I loved it, and I've never liked writing anything with pencils or ball-points.

I write with pen and paper, my first draft, on legal pads.

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.

I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

I often write in pencil on paper and then type up later. It's much quicker than using a keyboard.

I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.

I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.

There's something special about writing by hand, writing with a fountain pen, and there's something special about writing into a book, to take a blank book and turn it into an actual book.

I always write in pencil, so I can erase.

I always write on unlined typing paper and write the first draft in longhand, using cheap Bic pens. I try to write about four pages a day, which usually yields a first draft in six months. I don't plot ahead of time, so I'm flying by the seat of my pants for the first draft.

I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper.

I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee.

I do a lot of revising on paper. Sometimes I think I should just write longhand - what I type reads very different once I print it out.

I don't write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

I love pens, especially when writing on good-quality paper. But I don't have a favorite - I try all kinds in all colors. Like most folks, I misplace them a lot, so I don't use anything too fancy.

I got to take classes in writing with a fountain pen, and actually, something you make is your own textbook. So, while you're learning about something, you have to write essays on it, and then you handwrite in cursive, in fountain pen, your essays out on beautiful paper and you bind it together into a book that you hand in at the end of the course.

An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.

Write . . . write . . . pencil . . . paper.

I find a lot of writing happens when you're not actually at the computer. So I carry a notebook.

The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.

I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.

I'm always writing; I'm always jotting things down on paper or making notes in my iPhone. Then I'll make myself sit down and kind of shape it up, but there's really no other way to practice other than onstage.