Paul Auster Quotes

Whenever I try to do anything on a typewriter, it's like having this machine between me and the words; what comes out is not quite what would come out if I were scribbling.

There's something special about writing by hand, writing with a fountain pen, and there's something special about writing into a book, to take a blank book and turn it into an actual book.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

A journalist uses the most precise words he or she can. An artist does the same sort of thing. You gather material about a particular subject, you refine it as best you can.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

A pen connects you to the paper. It definitely matters.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

I like the process of pencil and paper as opposed to a machine. I think the writing is better when it's done in handwriting.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I feel like math and writing are the same thing. You're putting together a lot of complex things to satisfy different requirements. It's got to be aesthetically pleasing; it's got to have subtext; it's got to convey information.

I think either you're creative or you're not. In general, I don't think you need to be in pain to actually be creative unless you're writing love songs. Then you might need to have some ups and downs within your emotions to start to capture that.

I work by hand, with a fountain pen, in bound notebooks I buy in India.

What we ask of music, first and last, is that it communicate experience - experience of all kinds, vital and profound at its greatest, amusing or entertaining at another level.

I want to create. I think that's the one word I can grow on.

I'm always looking at ways of shaking up the writing experience because I think it helps.

The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

Sound comes out of a life experience.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

The pen is very quick for getting stuff from your brain to the page. I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper.

The creative act is like writing a letter. A letter is a project; you don't sit down to write a letter unless you know what you want to say and to whom you want to say it.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.