Paul Auster Quotes

In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.

I guess that in a lot of ways, my writing is more of a character to me than something that I feel personally attached to.

I remember, when I was young, to have a literary or artistic vocation was really dramatic because you were so isolated from the common world. You felt that you were marginal, and if you dared to try to organise your life around your vocation, you knew you'd be completely segregated.

In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don't want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer.

I never felt like I was in the grime scene. I was the outsider. So when I veered away from it, I didn't feel like I was leaving the circle - I felt like I was never in it.

The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.

Just because I'm a recording artist doesn't mean I'm not an artist. Because I had to grow.

Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to get a glimmer of what this means.

It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill - it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.

No matter what genre of music you play when you rack up a couple years of experience, you have your own point of view no matter who it is that is coming in front of you whether it's a pop artist or a country artist. Whoever.

I don't want to just be an actor my whole life. I mean I do want to be an actor my whole life but not only an actor, I want to be an artist.

The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.

I became an artist because of the possibility it gave me to develop in another way, because I didn't want to follow the same lines the others around me did. I was educated in the former German Democratic Republic, which meant that an individual figure had to be... like a soldier in the army.

Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.

The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we’re watching, and dealing with.

The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work.

Artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.

I wouldn't consider myself an outsider artist because I have a university degree in painting.

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

And me I'm in my bedroom drawing in my notebook Because my hand thinks I'm an artist But my heart knows I'm a poet It's just words they mean so little to me.

I paint all the time. Each night I wrestle, I paint my face because I am an artist. It's kind of all coming together where I am able to do everything I really love to do and need in my life.

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.

Being an artist doesn’t take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it’s no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.

Strangely enough a lot of my ideals are christian in a sense but I don't like the way that religion is portrayed in America but, I think, the album "Antichrist Superstar" really expresses, when you look at the lyrics it expresses, how I feel. I mean it's based in individuality and, strength and believe in yourself, believe in, you're your own god.

The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.