Paul Auster - Books Quotes

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You find the book in the process of doing it. That's the adventure of the job.

Paul Auster
Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.

Paul Auster
As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.

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.

Paul Auster
To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

Paul Auster
Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity.

Paul Auster
If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a sound or not? Hector had read a lot of books by then, he knew all the tricks and arguments of the philosophers. If someone makes a movie and no one sees it, does the movie exist or not?

Paul Auster
Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man's solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

Paul Auster
The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn't really anyone, and I wasn't really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man's book.

Paul Auster
When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.

Paul Auster
The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.

Paul Auster
As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.

Paul Auster
I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.

Paul Auster
Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.

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

Paul Auster