Books Quotes by Paul Auster

Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.

— Paul Auster

One should never underestimate the power of books.

— Paul Auster

Every man is the author of his own life.

— Paul Auster

You find the book in the process of doing it. That's the adventure of the job.

— Paul Auster

“And that's finally all anyone wants out of a book- to be amused”

— Paul Auster

“Translators are the shadow heroes of literature.”

— Paul Auster

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.

— Paul Auster

I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach…

— Paul Auster

“I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author.”

— Paul Auster

I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of…

— Paul Auster

“Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination.”

— Paul Auster

I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.

— Paul Auster

The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.

— Paul Auster

For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I…

— Paul Auster

I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some…

— Paul Auster

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them…

— Paul Auster

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have…

— Paul Auster

I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every…

— Paul Auster

I hate reading digital books. I don't enjoy the experience. I like smelling the paper, turning the pages. I think the book…

— Paul Auster

You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad…

— Paul Auster

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close,…

— Paul Auster

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms…

— Paul Auster

Art is not politics. The glory of the novel is that in its essence, it is a democratic form, because it treats…

— Paul Auster

Actually, screenplays were much more detailed than what I did in the book In the book I had to invent a style…

— Paul Auster

“Each book is a new book. I’ve never written it before and I have to teach myself how to write it as…

— Paul Auster

“I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I…

— Paul Auster

I wanted to do something different. Therefore, the first person I thought would have been too exclusionary. It would have said me,…

— Paul Auster

My children haven't read 'Winter Journal'. They have read some of my work, but I really don't foist it on them. I…

— Paul Auster

I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving.…

— Paul Auster

While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period…

— Paul Auster

“Little by little, as you came to know her better in the weeks that followed, you discovered that eye to eye on…

— paul auster

“In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not…

— Paul Auster

There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.

— Paul Auster

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

— Paul Auster

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

— Paul Auster

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.

— Paul Auster

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its…

— Paul Auster

You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions.

— Paul Auster

I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture…

— Paul Auster

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find…

— Paul Auster