Paul Auster Sayings

#1. When you live in Brooklyn, if you throw a rock, you'll hit a writer - Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Paul Auster.

Libba Bray

#2. I'd love a signed first edition of 'City of Glass' by Paul Auster. My favourite book of all time.

Steven Hall

#3. Guilt kept me going. It was impossible not to blame myself for what had happened, but even guilt was a comfort. It was a human feeling, a sign that I was still attached to the same world that other men lived in.

Paul Auster

#4. The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

Paul Auster

#5. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.

Paul Auster

#6. There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.

Paul Auster

#7. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.

Paul Auster

#8. His master was a man with the heart of a dog. He was a rambler, a rough-and-ready soldier of fortune, a one-of-a-kind two-leg who improvised the rules as he went along. They

Paul Auster

#9. You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either.

Paul Auster

#10. And even if there was an end, it seemed doubtful that I would ever know about it - which meant that the story would go on and on, secreting its poison inside me forever.

Paul Auster

#11. There is only this world and that numbing routines and brief squabbles and financial worries are an essential part of it, that in spite of the aches and boredomes and disappointments, living in this world is the closest we will ever come to seeing paradise.

Paul Auster

#12. He wants to say. That is to say, he means. As in the French, "vouloir dire," which means, literally, to want to say, but which means, in fact, to mean. He means to say what he wants. He wants to say what he means. He says what he wants to mean. He means what he says.

Paul Auster

#13. There's an imp inside me, and if I don't let him out to make some mischief now and then, the world just gets too damned dull. I hate feeling grumpy and bored. I'm an enthusiast, and the more dangerous my life becomes, the happier I am.

Paul Auster

#14. 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

#15. That once you throw your life to the winds, you will discover things you had never known before, things that cannot be learned under any other circumstances.

Paul Auster

#16. All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

Paul Auster

#17. It was a dizzying prospect - to imagine all that freedom, to understand how little it mattered what choice he made.

Paul Auster

#18. What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?

Paul Auster

#19. As I write this now, I realize that even on that first day I had slipped through a hole in the earth, that I was falling into a place where I had never been before.

Paul Auster

#20. In the long run, stories are probably no less valuable than money, but in the short run they have their decided

Paul Auster

#21. We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

Paul Auster

#22. Would it not be better to learn the truth once and for all instead of living in a state of perpetual uncertainty?

Paul Auster

#23. Anything for the truth. No sacrifice is too great.

Paul Auster

#24. We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

Paul Auster

#25. Every man is the author of his own life.

Paul Auster

#26. The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait.

Paul Auster

#27. When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

Paul Auster

#28. Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

Paul Auster

#29. We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

Paul Auster

#30. I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it's a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can't separate persona from psyche; you just can't do it.

Paul Auster

#31. I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question
whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

Paul Auster

#32. Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.

Paul Auster

#33. The boundaries of my world had shrunk, but I was still alive, and as long as I could go on breathing and farting and thinking my thoughts, what difference did it make where I was?

Paul Auster

#34. Les moments de crise produsent un redoublement de vie chez les hommes.
Moments of crisis produce a redoubled vitality in men. Or, more succinctly perhaps: Men don't begin to live fully until thier backs are against the wall.

Paul Auster

#35. I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.

Paul Auster

#36. I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.

Paul Auster

#37. In the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself. Which is as much as to say: lives make no sense.

Paul Auster

#38. In fifteen years, Sachs traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by the time he came to that last place, I doubt he even knew who he was anymore. So much distance had been covered by then, it wouldn't have been possible for him to remember where he had begun.

Paul Auster

#39. Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.

Paul Auster

#40. It was. It will never be again. Remember.

Paul Auster

#41. In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I've done it, each time I've done it I've felt deeply immersed in the material as I'm doing it, and then it's over and everything is the same.

Paul Auster

#42. He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny. As he put it in his journal that night: If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of destroying it.

Paul Auster

#43. Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

Paul Auster

#44. Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

Paul Auster

#45. I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

Paul Auster

#46. In my later novels, I systematically used the convention, and then a moment came - when did it come? With The Book of Illusions, maybe - I thought, I don't need them anymore, I don't need them, I want to integrate the dialogue into the text.

Paul Auster

#47. It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.

Paul Auster

#48. People pushed by force of habit, pushed for the pure pleasure of pushing, and they would go on pushing until you showed them you were willing to push back, at which point you would earn their respect.

Paul Auster

#49. Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin.

Paul Auster

#50. Once you fell in love with her, you
loved her until the day you died.

Paul Auster

#51. 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. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he has no intention of ever leaving it again.

Paul Auster

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

Paul Auster

#53. He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

Paul Auster

#54. It's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes
all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom

Paul Auster

#55. Our lives are determined by manifold contingencies,' I said, trying to be as succinct as possible, 'and every day we struggle against these shocks and accidents in order to keep our balance.

Paul Auster

#56. As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.

Paul Auster

#57. I was looking for a quiet place to die.

Paul Auster

#58. He is twenty-eight years old, and to the best of his knowledge he has no ambitions. No burning ambitions, in any case, no clear idea of what building a plausible future might entail for him.

Paul Auster

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

Paul Auster

#60. The world is so unpredictable.
Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly.
We want to feel we are in control of our own existence.
In some ways we are , in some ways we are not ...

Paul Auster

#61. After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.

Paul Auster

#62. It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.

Paul Auster

#63. For the fact is that it takes a great deal of self-confidence for a person to poke fun at himself, and a person with that kind of self-confidence is rarely a fool or a bungler.

Paul Auster

#64. Children are a consolation for everthing - except having children.

Paul Auster

#65. You had to invent something. It's not possible to leave it blank. The mind
won't let you.

Paul Auster

#66. Still, I had a hunch about it, and if there's one thing I've learned in my long and stupid career as a man, it's the importance of listening to my hunches.

Paul Auster

#67. 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

#68. It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.

Paul Auster

#69. Afterwards, walking to the car with my father, he told me I had played a nice game. No I hadn't, I said, it was terrible. Well, you did your best, he answered. You can't do well everytime.

Paul Auster

#70. Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.

Paul Auster

#71. Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

Paul Auster

#72. I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me.

Paul Auster

#73. 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.

Paul Auster

#74. She'd seen the spark in his fledgling soul, and no one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him.

Paul Auster

#75. No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it's only to the degree that they cannot be understood.

Paul Auster

#76. All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.

Paul Auster

#77. I couldn't imagine myself doing it anymore. It was part of my life that had ended for me, and here was my chance to set out on a fresh course

Paul Auster

#78. Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.

Paul Auster

#79. We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Paul Auster

#80. Without him, we are nothing, but the paradox is that we, the figments of another mind, will outlive the mind that made us, for once we are thrown into the world, we continue to exist forever, and our stories go on being told, even after we are dead.

Paul Auster

#81. Money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.

Paul Auster

#82. As says who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true.

Paul Auster

#83. And then one day the walls of your house finally collapse. If the door is still standing, however, all you have to do is walk through it,and you are back inside. It's pleasant sleeping out under the stars. Never mind the rain. It can't last very long.

Paul Auster

#84. Perhaps when we shrink down to almost nothing, we will at last find one another. Life is, after all, very difficult. Most of us die here simply because we forget to breathe.

Paul Auster

#85. 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

#86. In my studio, it is unkempt and unattractive. Once I'm in my work, I don't notice where I am.

Paul Auster

#87. As long as we avoided the real subject, the spell could not be broken. We both slipped naturally into this kind of banter, and it became all the more powerful because neither of us abandoned the charade. We knew what we were doing, but at the same time we pretended not to.

Paul Auster

#88. She's too sad to be beautiful. No one that sad can still be beautiful.

Paul Auster

#89. He wondered why he turned so sentimental.
That's what happened when you have no one to talk to.

Paul Auster

#90. Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.

Paul Auster

#91. ... those were the subjects that Barber dealt with as a historian, and no matter how scrupulous and profession he was in treating them, there was always a personal motive behind his work, a secret conviction that he was somehow digging into the mysteries of his own life.

Paul Auster

#92. When a man feels he has come to the end of his rope, it is perfectly natural that he should want to scream.

Paul Auster

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

Paul Auster

#94. In the old physics, three times two equals six and two times three equals 6 are reversible propositions. Not in quantum physics. Three times two and two times three are two different matters, distinct and separate propositions.

Paul Auster

#95. 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

#96. I always sense the future, the antithesis of everything is always before my eyes. I have never seen a child without thinking that it would grow old, nor a cradle without thinking of a grave. The sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton.

Paul Auster

#97. I'm in constant inner dialogue with my father still.

Paul Auster

#98. As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out

Paul Auster

#99. Con men and tricksters run the world. Rascals rule. And do you know why?
because they are hungier than we are. because they know what they want. because they believe in life more than we do.

Paul Auster

#100. The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be sympathetic and read each word carefully and understand what I'm writing about. I suppose every writer feels this.

Paul Auster