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

More quotes by Paul Auster

Image
This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly - with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe.
Paul Auster
Image
As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.
Paul Auster
Image
I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.
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
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
Every man is the author of his own life.
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
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
When I look back at experience [with my father], all I can do is feel pity. You know, how torn he was about how to act, what to say. And it seems an important story to me.
Paul Auster
Image
I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
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
In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.
Paul Auster
Image
I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
Paul Auster
Image
Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.
Paul Auster
Image
I think all writers are a bit crazy Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.
Paul Auster
Image
Dismantling the architecture of my discontent
Paul Auster
Image
I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.
Paul Auster
Image
I'm really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.
Paul Auster
Image
All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
Paul Auster
Image
We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.
Paul Auster