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Writer Quotes by Paul Auster

78 Writer quotes by Paul Auster

All Writer quotes Paul Auster’s page

Paul Auster observes that a book is a private meeting between one reader and the pages, not a theater for many. He says becoming a writer is less a career choice and more a moment when the craft chooses you, and you accept the role. When a book is finished, he feels it no longer belongs to him but is handed to other people to spark their imagination.

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I like the sound a typewriter makes.

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Fiction creating reality.

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I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.

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“knowing now that the job of writing was as much about removing words as adding them,”

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No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

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

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

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You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.

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All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

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When I'm writing, I don't feel neurotic. So it's better for the family if I'm working.

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I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who…

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Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on…

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

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

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

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

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I think there might be some pressure released while I'm doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.

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

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

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Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts…

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I don't even own a computer. I write by hand then I type it up on an old manual typewriter. But I…

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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…

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When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few…

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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…

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All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to…

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

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Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand,…

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Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected…

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

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The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.

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[Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer.

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

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I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.

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Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.

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

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You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book,…

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“For me, books were not the containers of words so much as the words themselves, and the value of a given book…

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Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even…

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The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.

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I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do…

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More by Paul Auster

“On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to…

“No es que escribir me produzca un gran placer, pero es mucho peor si no lo hago.”

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…

I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me.

The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.

“What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him, but a person he had invented, an artificial creature he could…

I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.

As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.

Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.

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…

I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet - an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we…

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some…

“Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect…

“and cut down many trees. When the Humans”