Quote

I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.

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
Reading
Prose
Often
Liked
Writing
Poet
Would
Poetry
Divert
Life
Novel
Detective
Serious
Detectives
Wasn
Poems
Started
Novels

More quotes by Paul Auster

Image
I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.
Paul Auster
Image
We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
Paul Auster
Image
After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
Paul Auster
Image
Don't be a writer, it's a terrible way to live your life, there's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it.
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
We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
Paul Auster
Image
The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
Paul Auster
Image
For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.
Paul Auster
Image
I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
Paul Auster
Image
Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.
Paul Auster
Image
You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
Paul Auster
Image
For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
Paul Auster
Image
Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
Paul Auster
Image
The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.
Paul Auster
Image
[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.
Paul Auster
Image
Fiction creating reality.
Paul Auster
Image
Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
Paul Auster
Image
Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’
Paul Auster
Image
I haven't done any translating for decades now. It's something I did when I was young.
Paul Auster
Image
I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.
Paul Auster