Paul Auster quotes - page 2

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.' (Paul Auster)
I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much. View quote
Paul Auster
I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them. View quote
Paul Auster
What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That's always first. View quote
Paul Auster
Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever. View quote
Paul Auster
We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next. View quote
Paul Auster
Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years. View quote
Paul Auster
We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence. View quote
Paul Auster
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity. View quote
Paul Auster
The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly. View quote
Paul Auster
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. (Paul Auster)
Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales. View quote
Paul Auster
Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories. View quote
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. View quote
Paul Auster
Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life. View quote
Paul Auster
Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can. View quote
Paul Auster
I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it. View quote
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. View quote
Paul Auster
I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious. View quote
Paul Auster
You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either. View quote
Paul Auster
I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it's a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can't separate persona from psyche; you just can't do it. (Paul Auster)
The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth. View quote
Paul Auster
I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground. View quote
Paul Auster
I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films. View quote
Paul Auster
When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound. View quote
Paul Auster