American - Author | February 3, 1947 -
I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.
Paul Auster
AgeHateThinkWantMoreAnything
When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
MindReadingYouNewYoungSound
The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'
MeBookReadingDownSaidThree
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.
LifeGoodLiveMy LifeEnoughWant
I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.
WalkMeShoppingClothesFindGo
I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.
MyselfFeetThinkRealistClassic
The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.
MyselfTalkingPersonalBecauseMost
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.
LifeLiveSolitudePovertyYouGo
What keeps me up at night? Anxiety. Anxiety, the inability to go to sleep, it's quite literally that.
SleepMeNightAnxietyGoUp
What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That's always first.
FamilyLoveChildrenPeopleMeCare
I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.
PeopleSocietyBelieveBlackNeed
Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.
WritingFeelYouStopGoLiving
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