Paul Auster Quotes

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.

The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.

I had a series of terrible jobs, whatever would allow me to write for four hours during the day. During that time I wrote three novels - all of which were extraordinarily poor. I decided after that to go and get my MFA.

I continue to write. It's just one of those things that I do. I'll have periods when I write and periods when I don't. But you don't want it to become a discipline really. If it becomes a discipline, it becomes a chore and that's no good.

I couldn't be a novelist for instance. It feels like a very lonely endeavor. I don't know that I could survive the solitude of that.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.

When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

I'm really open to just about anything but I think the real dream is to be able to write my own thing.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

Write for pleasure and publish for money.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.

I've never been that person who thought that because I've written one novel, I should write another and another. It's only when there was another novel to write that I was going to write another.

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

I'm more interested in writing than in performing.

I had a vision of myself as a novelist because that was where I could be serious. I couldn't with music.

I will write another book if I feel like it.