Quote

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

Paul Auster

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Always
Books
Audience
Interesting
Film
Persons
Person
Encountering
Book
Opposed
Thing
Films

More quotes by Paul Auster

Image
Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.
Paul Auster
Image
It's always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there.
Paul Auster
Image
Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.
Paul Auster
Image
I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
Paul Auster
Image
It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.
Paul Auster
Image
All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
Paul Auster
Image
There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
Paul Auster
Image
As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
Paul Auster
Image
All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
Paul Auster
Image
I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.
Paul Auster
Image
It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.
Paul Auster
Image
Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.
Paul Auster
Image
I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
Paul Auster
Image
The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect.
Paul Auster
Image
How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
Paul Auster
Image
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
Paul Auster
Image
My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.
Paul Auster
Image
I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly the relationship between the man who finds the briefcase and the woman whose husband owned the briefcase. It's quite a beautiful passage.
Paul Auster
Image
Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.
Paul Auster
Image
Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.
Paul Auster