Paul Auster Quotes

I don't know what else teaches you as much as writing. Perhaps reading. So if I don't have one or the other in the course of the day, I feel old.

I think that it's worthwhile to explore the ways in which you write the person that's writing your plays as opposed to simply assuming that it's all a natural process and there's no design in it. Because your public persona is designed, to a certain extent, and you can have fun and profit at various times doing that.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

My musical instrument is Hebrew and, to me, this is the most important fact about my writing. I write in words. I don write in sounds or in shapes or in flavors. I write in words. And my words are Hebrew words.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

The Hollywood stuff in the book tended to come later. I think it was because I was worried about leading with that stuff. I wanted to try to make sure that the other stories in the book were as interesting. I wanted to spend more time on them and craft them. The thing is, with writing, it's form or content.

In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.' I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.

I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world--or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)

There seems to be a strange affectation in authors of appearing to have done everything by chance.

I think it just has to do with getting older and getting better at what it was I was doing, and that I could take something small and kind of take my time with it. I think actually what that has to do with is I quit drinking. Before that I told myself I could only drink if I was - if I was writing, I had to be drinking. So I was on a timer, because eventually you get too drunk to write.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

I don't see myself directing things I don't write because, to me, directing was just an extension of the writing process.

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.

The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction I think it’s almost imperative that you identify an audience so you can confirm or challenge or undermine whatever ideas or prejudices they might have about your subject.

I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.

When I do research, I have done - 90 percent of my time is the research, the other ten percent is the writing. So I don't have to face a blank piece of paper. I can look at this as a quote that I have from somewhere.

I don't think people need to know much about me to understand the book, or to enjoy it. The book stands by itself. Over the last several years, my life has been all about writing these books, but the books aren't about my life.

The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

reading is not a passive act. It's a creative act. It's a relationship between the writer and a person the writer will probably never meet. I think it's very wrong to write in a way that leaves no room for the reader to maneuver. I don't want to get in the way. What I'd really like to do is to perform the Indian Rope Trick - go higher and higher and eventually disappear.

I'm not really a full-time director, I just like to direct the things that I write because I think I'm going to know it better than someone else.