Paul Auster Quotes

Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it.

Stories develop from things I read and also from my own experiences and experiences of people I know.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

I find it inspiring and I always think when I'm working on something new, whether it's a new kind of character or a new kind of story or new kind of camera, it gets my creative wheels spinning.

I think it's good to leave people with the memory of that being a great character. And if we have a reason to bring him back, we'll bring him back.

I think writer is a word without gender, and a good writer observes, absorbs, hopefully empathizes then translates that into character and story. You don’t have to do or be or have experienced, traveled to, but you have to imagine all of that, very well–and believe it completely during the bubble of the work.

I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story.

When I'm writing, I don't put faces on the characters. When I finish the first draft of the script, I start visualizing, and sometimes then I think about one actor.

Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Sometimes my lyrics may describe a situation that happened to a friend. Other times, I create a story from the ground up.

I love stories. I just enjoy telling stories and watching what these characters do - although writing continues to be just as hard as it always was.

It's all about letting the story take over.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

I like inventing things when I write rather than autobiography.

When I was young, I assumed that authors must have traveled the world or done exotic things in order to tell great stories.

I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.

When I'm writing, I'm creating the story and its character with words. I'm thinking about what the pictures will be like, but I never begin to sketch. The pictures are all in my head.

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

I have been writing songs and poems since I was a little girl. I started writing short scripts, which evolved into the idea for a book.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

Sometimes I hear a voice - sometimes it's the voice of someone I know. And sometimes that leads to a character, which leads to a story.