Quotes from Paul Auster

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

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy.

How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesn't believe that, about other possibilities?

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.

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.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.

...once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.

What keeps me up at night? Anxiety. Anxiety, the inability to go to sleep, it's quite literally that.

Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I've never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

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

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

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.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.

I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

I'm generous. I give good tips. It's just - the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don't want anything. I'm not a consumer. I don't crave objects.

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

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

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.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.