Paul Auster

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

I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

I don't know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn't hurt the book.

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

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

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.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.

Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don't expect anything from anybody.

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.

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.

Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.

All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.