Quote

No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.

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
Materials
Like
Seem
World
Write
Includes
Doesn
Aesthetic
Seems
Limited
Compromise
Book
Material
Writing
Entire
Much

More quotes by Paul Auster

Image
When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.
Paul Auster
Image
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
Image
There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
Paul Auster
Image
I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work.
Paul Auster
Image
As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
Paul Auster
Image
The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.
Paul Auster
Image
The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.
Paul Auster
Image
Often it's true that films just go right through us. You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.
Paul Auster
Image
I was extremely shy. And I simply didn't know how to go about it. It seemed a lot easier to write than to make films. All I needed was a pencil and a piece of paper, whereas filmmaking was something I had no access to.
Paul Auster
Image
If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
Paul Auster
Image
Fiction creating reality.
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
Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.
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
We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
Paul Auster
Image
Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.
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
Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.
Paul Auster
Image
I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.
Paul Auster
Image
I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.
Paul Auster