Paul Auster Quotes

It takes me ages to write stuff.

I've never been a fast writer.

Well, I'm a slow writer. For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I'd love to be more efficient, but I am not.

Out of all of the things I've written, 'Dot' was the quickest from first thoughts to full production.

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

There's no such thing as easy, but it's easier when a script is good.

I don't write quickly, and I don't want to.

It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.

I'm not the fastest writer. I can't just crank out ideas that are good enough.

I don't actually have to think very hard when I'm writing. I mean, there are times where it's a task, and you have to plug away and plug away. But then there are times when a song writes itself in 15 minutes, and you're just struggling to keep up with it.

I don't have many hours in a day, as I'm essentially a single parent. But fortunately, I'm a really fast writer. My goal is usually 10 pages a day. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but by the end of the week, I aim for at least 10,000 words.

Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks. I don't know what that means.

It takes me, like, half an hour to write the lyrics for a song. They just come out.

Sometimes you'll write while listening to a piece of music and think it's great, but then you'll go back and read it without the music and go, 'This sucks.'

As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough - I wrote faster than I would write a letter - two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it.

I don't want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of writing. It's rather like a pressure cooker with a certain amount of pressure in it - the more you let out, the less you cook.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

When I do write, it happens really easily. I'll just kind of sing along to whatever I'm playing, then find a line to build off of, then sit down and write. When I do write, I take care of business!

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.

Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.

I think there's a general misconception that anything written quickly lacks quality, and I don't believe that.

Nobody sits down and says, 'Well, I'm going to write a bad book.' They sit down to write a great book, but it doesn't always turn out like that. The writer may do his best and still write a so-so book, and other times, it just flows easily. But I don't know how you can control that.

For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence.

I spill it out as fast as I can. I don't really edit. In Brazil, recently, I wrote 70 pages. In London, 80 pages.

In weeks when I was writing a novel, I followed a five-day schedule, doing about thirty pages a day, so a typical Ace novel would take me six or seven days to write.