Quote

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

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
Kind
Edgar
Would
Demonic
Thomas
Writers
Pynchon
Boys
Georges
Joy
Allan
Take
Luis
Writing
Borges

More quotes by 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
My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.
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
The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
Paul Auster
Image
We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
Paul Auster
Image
I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese.
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
Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
Paul Auster
Image
I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.
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
And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.
Paul Auster
Image
I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
Paul Auster
Image
I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.
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
There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
Paul Auster
Image
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
Image
Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.
Paul Auster
Image
If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics
Paul Auster
Image
[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.
Paul Auster
Image
In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.
Paul Auster