Paul Auster Quotes

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read 'Crime and Punishment,' and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, 'cause it was the first time that I hadn't just entered a book, but a book had entered me.

This sounds corny, but I once told a kid when I was in a the library conference, the best - not the best, what I really hope for is that someday 20, 30 years from now, some kid, 12-year-old, 15-year-old, in Des Moines will be going through the stacks, if they have stacks anymore - they probably won't - and find a book of mine and get something from it.

My father gave me Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that.

Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.

I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.

Poul Anderson's 'The High Crusade' may have had a greater impact on my development as a writer than any other book I ever read.

In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, 'Breakfast of Champions' and immediately fell in love.

Dostoevsky was my literary idol for a long time.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

I have always loved 'Stig of the Dump.' I think reading that book made me officially realise that I was a reader.

Gerald's Game' had such an impact on me when I read the book in college that I think I've actually, consciously or unconsciously, been incorporating elements of that story into my work ever since.

One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.

I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.

There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.

In high school I read [Lev] Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and loved it. Then I read [Friedrich] Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" and that hit me hard. I don't know where I got it. My parents warned me not to mention either of those books when I went for my college interviews so I wouldn't seem like an egghead. They told me to talk about sports.

The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book.

I think for Lev [Grossman], C. S. Lewis was a huge inspiration from his childhood. I know that Brideshead Revisited is a book that he's incredibly found of and he took certain structural influences from that book that he brought into The Magicians.

Of all my films, people wrote to me most about this one... ...I had wanted to make The Idiot long before Rashomon. Since I was little I've liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film. He is still my favourite author, and he is the one - I still think - who writes most honestly about human existence.

Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.