Quotes from Paul Auster

In my studio, it is unkempt and unattractive. Once I'm in my work, I don't notice where I am.

I've been very lucky in this second marriage. It's just luck. It's absolute luck. And I can only marvel at it. So many other things could have happened that didn't, so overall I feel blessed.

Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?

Every man is the author of his own life.

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

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

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

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

I really have no interest in myself.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

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.

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

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.

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

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.

I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work.

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 an audience, it's one to one.

When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.

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.

People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.