Paul Auster Quotes

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

Every book is like starting over again. I've written books every way possible - from using tight outlines to writing from the seat of my pants. Both ways work.

I don't have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.

I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.

My first novel, 'John Crow's Devil,' freed me up to write about the past, and 'The Book of Night Women' freed me up to have a book totally based on voice and being very spontaneous.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.

I don't consciously think of any certain direction when I'm writing. I only try not to be repetitive or redundant.

In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else.

I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

I like it when I can hear directly from the writer: what they're seeing, what they're envisioning, and what their intention is.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

I don't like outlining, because books are organic things. Sometimes a book doesn't want to be written in a certain way.