Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
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
Would
Novel
Taken
Write
Two
Crystallizes
Past
Ferociously
Writing
Novels
Something
Six
Years
Months
More quotes by 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
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
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
We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
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
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
I was extremely shy. And I simply didn't know how to go about it. It seemed a lot easier to write than to make films. All I needed was a pencil and a piece of paper, whereas filmmaking was something I had no access to.
Paul Auster
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
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
As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
Paul Auster
I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can't tell you how lucky I feel, that I've managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I've been able to do what I want to do.
Paul Auster
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
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
Paul Auster
It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.
Paul Auster
The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
Paul Auster
Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
Paul Auster
It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
Paul Auster
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
Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
Paul Auster
Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it
Paul Auster
