Paul Auster Quotes

I can't just turn over and sing disco or rock.

That was the appealing thing about comics: There literally is no budget in comics. You're only limited by your imagination.

At Temple University, and I'm sure this was the way in a lot of film classes, comedy was not an option, and not considered a serious form of expression. You had to make a film about an issue.

I coined this term 'freedom thru limitation' back in the '90s because I was sick of art being treated like pop, because of this boring 'anything can be art' theory.

We were kind of caught up in the genre trap. We didn't really have a lot of artistic freedom. They wanted us to go into a certain direction, so they could promote us easier.

Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.

As an artist, program directors always want to put you in a little box.

Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint you can at it.

That joy of a creative environment, without any restrictions, is hard to leave.

I love to come to L.A. because it's one of the most inspiring places because there are no rules.

I've always been political but I don't like to bring it into my work any more because I think it limits me.

One of the great things about working for Netflix is that they haven't placed any restrictions on content or artistically.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can't make music.

I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.

We are most artistically caged.

A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.

I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.

I just want to act - commercial, mainstream, niche or art - my choices are not defined by labels.

Novelists should be free to write whatever they want, to let their imaginations roam as close to or as removed from reality as they see fit.

It's much harder to work for yourself, by yourself, than to create work for a gallery, because there are no limits and you can do anything you want. It's always easier when you have a parameter, when you have a limit. You can work within the limit and push it and walk the line, but when you're given absolutely no limits, it's harder. You must really think. It's more challenging.

There is nothing that art cannot express.

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

Hollywood desires money but they could not stand the political content.

I've always been really selective. I just didn't have the right to be as selective in other years, I guess. It's very difficult to commit so much of your life to go shoot something that you think sucks, so I'd rather do nothing than go work on something that I really hate. Obviously, there are moments where you have to take jobs for money, everybody needs to pay their rent or whatever.