I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing. — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author.” — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books. — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life. — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books? — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close,… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book,… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
“For me, books were not the containers of words so much as the words themselves, and the value of a given book… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Actually, screenplays were much more detailed than what I did in the book In the book I had to invent a style… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
It's an ethical pact I've made with myself and with the reader - not to invent. And when I can't remember, I… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
“Little by little, as you came to know her better in the weeks that followed, you discovered that eye to eye on… — paul auster Copy Share Image
“In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions. — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that,… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Human beings need stories, and we're looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it's television, whether it's comic books or… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
“On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
“No es que escribir me produzca un gran placer, pero es mucho peor si no lo hago.” — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
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… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count. — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
“What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him, but a person he had invented, an artificial creature he could… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof. — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true. — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience. — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
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… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet - an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
