Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'
Paul Auster
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Three
Two
Fever
Wanted
Punishment
Book
Convinced
Thing
Crime
Writer
Days
Reading
More quotes by Paul Auster
I like the sound a typewriter makes.
Paul Auster
I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
Paul Auster
I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.
Paul Auster
Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?
Paul Auster
But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
Paul Auster
Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.
Paul Auster
Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it
Paul Auster
As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.
Paul Auster
I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.
Paul Auster
What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That's always first.
Paul Auster
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
Paul Auster
Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.
Paul Auster
You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.
Paul Auster
Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.
Paul Auster
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
We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.
Paul Auster
I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
Paul Auster
Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.
Paul Auster
It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me.
Paul Auster
When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
Paul Auster