Quote

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.

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
Really
Life
Solitary
Writer
Takes
Business
Sense
Writing
Even

More quotes by Paul Auster

Image
I know that what's happened in the election has changed American reality, and I understand that I have to change with it. I have to rethink how I live my life. I'm not a political essayist I don't see that I would have any value cranking out articles for newspapers or magazines, because lots of people are doing that already.
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
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
Image
Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
Paul Auster
Image
Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.
Paul Auster
Image
I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet - an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we think about them so much that we name a ship after them. The imaginary lives on in the real.
Paul Auster
Image
I see myself as anybody, as everybody I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
Paul Auster
Image
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
Image
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
Image
How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesnt believe that, about other possibilities?
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
I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.
Paul Auster
Image
In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I've done it, each time I've done it I've felt deeply immersed in the material as I'm doing it, and then it's over and everything is the same.
Paul Auster
Image
Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.
Paul Auster
Image
In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.
Paul Auster
Image
Fiction creating reality.
Paul Auster
Image
I don't like talking about my work at all. I find it very difficult. I never know what to say. It's too close to me, and there's so many things happening unconsciously while I'm working that I'm not aware of, and people will point these things out to me, and I'll say, That's interesting. But I don't know what to make of it.
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
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
The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.
Paul Auster