Quote

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

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
Live
Burning
Nothing
Ahead
Mean
Solitude
Really
Taste
Way
Poverty
Things
Writer
Life
Terrible
Obscurity
Means
Gained

More quotes by Paul Auster

Image
As Siri says, who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true.
Paul Auster
Image
Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.
Paul Auster
Image
I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don't even have a computer, I don't have a cell phone.
Paul Auster
Image
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
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
There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.
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
Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.
Paul Auster
Image
When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word memoir on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, No, no, no, no, no, no. No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.
Paul Auster
Image
Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that's wonderful. But when people have built up a sort of resentment or animosity for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, they read in bad faith.
Paul Auster
Image
You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.
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
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
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
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
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
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
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
To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.
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