Paul Auster Quotes About Giving

Quotes about: Giving

• Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

  Paul Auster

  Struggle, Writing, Hands

  "I want to tell you a story" by Paul Auster, www.theguardian.com. November 4, 2006.

• Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within...By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.

  Paul Auster

  Eye, Thinking, Wandering Aimlessly

• 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

  Book, Exercise, Escaping

  Paul Auster (2016). “Collected Novels Volume Four”, p.102, Faber & Faber

• Writing is, after all, a gesture towards other people, giving something to others. And so it's not a completely hermetic exercise. It's really an opening up.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Exercise, Opening Up

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

• 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.

  Paul Auster

  Giving, Want, Way

• Just the fact that Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by such a large number gives some validation to the impulse to stand firm. If we don't, I think within a year administration is pretty much going to dismantle American society as we've known it. I'm not sure that we're able to stop it from happening, but I don't think people should just roll over and passively watch it happen.

  Paul Auster

  Thinking, People, Giving

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I've been asked several times over the years to become president, and I've always said no, because I didn't want to give up all the time from my work. The position won't be open for another year, but if they still want me then, I'll do it; I'll speak out as often as I can from that platform.

  Paul Auster

  Giving Up, President, Speak

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a writer writes can excite the imagination and the feelings of the reader, then that reader carries it around forever. Nothing is more vivid than good fiction.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Writing, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Years, Giving

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

• I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.

  Paul Auster

  Who I Am, Giving, Stories

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

• I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it's been a very split kind of response.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, People, Giving

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

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