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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
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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
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More quotes by Paul Auster
The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
Paul Auster
I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.
Paul Auster
Dismantling the architecture of my discontent
Paul Auster
When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.
Paul Auster
In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.
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
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
We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
Paul Auster
It's like a mathematical law, Grace.
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
He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny. As he put it in his journal that night: If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of destroying it.
Paul Auster
I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it's been a very split kind of response.
Paul Auster
There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
Paul Auster
I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.
Paul Auster
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
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
As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.
Paul Auster
Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.
Paul Auster
Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.
Paul Auster
