Paul Auster Quotes

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

I'm never writing as a character.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

My readers often tell me that what they admire about my books is my ability to write from so many points of view. My challenge to myself is whether I'll ever be able to write a novel just from one point of view. It seems impossible.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.

I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.

I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!

When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

I have an affinity for writing in the first person. I love the intimacy of being dropped inside the character.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.