Writing Quotes by Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

— Paul Auster

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— 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…

— Paul Auster

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details…

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

— Paul Auster

“the only one with an ear for prose who could follow his arguments about why Flannery O’Conner and Grace Paley were bolder,…

— Paul Auster

As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his…

— 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

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

— Paul Auster

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

— 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

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…

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was…

— Paul Auster

I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too,…

— 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 say at the very end of "Winter Journal" that I do dream about my father often. I think I have a…

— Paul Auster

For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were…

— Paul Auster

When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and…

— Paul Auster

“He realized that for Ponge there was no division between the work of writing and the work of seeing. For no word…

— Paul Auster

“There were no rules when it came to writing, he said. Take a close look at the lives of poets and novelists,…

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it.

— 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

Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where…

— Paul Auster

There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when…

— Paul Auster