Paul Auster Quotes

When I feel that something I'm writing is going well, everything in my life is good and the things in my life that aren't good are completely manageable. If it's not going well, Miss America could be standing there in a swimsuit handing me a nobel price and I wouldn't be happy about it

It's hard to explain how much one can love writing. If people knew how happy it can make you, we would all be writing all the time. It's the greatest secret of the world.

If I stopped writing and being at my piano, I wouldn't know how to live. It's your best friend.

There are many days when I want to throw my computer out the window, when I tell myself I'd be better off selling shoes at the mall. But I always keep at it, because I have to. Writing is completely part of who I am. Even if I never published another book, I would keep at it - because it feeds my life and makes it richer.

Everything can be going well, but if I'm not writing, I'm not happy. When I'm writing well, I'm like a different person.

Art was - and is - my biggest outlet. I'd probably die if I didn't do it.

I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.

I can't say that I love writing, but I do love the satisfaction that it gives me.

If I'm not creating, I'm not as happy.

The best part of being a writer for me is immersing myself in a fictional world, which is the opposite of being on social media. At the same time, if no one ever read my work, if I was writing solely for myself, I bet it would be lonely and a lot less fun.

Actually I'm writing as best I can, in order to keep the momentum and the career there, but I want to live.

I'd hate to be a writer forever and never perform, and I'd hate to perform and not write. I get sad if time has passed and I haven't written or made anything. I'm an artist.

I wouldn't say the purpose of making art is to enjoy it necessarily. For me, it happens to be the thing I enjoy the most. I don't even know what the purpose of art is really, I just know that is something that makes me feel satisfied in a way that other things don't. That's all I know, that's why I like to write songs and films or draw. I just like to make things and somehow I find it gives me a feeling of satisfaction that I can't find in other areas of my life.

I was able to not fold and go in a corner because I had my writing as therapy, but also as my tool for struggle.

A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

I got so discouraged, I almost stopped writing. It was my 12-year-old son who changed my mind when he said to me, "Mother, you've been very cross and edgy with us and we notice you haven't been writing. We wish you'd go back to the typewriter. That did a lot of good for my false guilts about spending so much time writing. At that point, I acknowledged that I am a writer and even if I were never published again, that's what I am."

... oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love--not this efficient, philanthropic self.

Writing and the hope of writing pulls me back from the edges of despair. I believe insanity and despair are at times one and the same.

It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain....A day when I don't write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is affection, enthusiasm, adventure-any number of other words besides discipline.

I feel a passion for what we're trying to do.I mean, why does somebody who's old who's a writer keep writing? Because that's who they are.

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.

I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. ... It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.

It's always fun to do something that you know ultimately is not about the money, and it's certainly not for the fame - because it's a pain in the ass. But it's really the person in the theater seat you think about when you sit in a room and write.

I write for fanboy moments. I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. I write to do all the things the viewers want too. So the intensity of the fan response is enormously gratifying. It means I hit a nerve.