Paul Auster quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Paul Auster

Paul Auster Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Paul Auster on Wise Famous Quotes.

[...] one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives.

One very big album, bound in expensive leather with a gold-stamped title on the cover - This is our life: The Austers - was totally blank inside.

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

How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?

The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.

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

A good sense of humor, then, a taste for the ironies of life, and an appreciation of the absurd.

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

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.

Our hearts know what is in them, even if our mouths remain silent. And the world will know what it is, even when nothing remains in our hearts.

As long as you're dreaming, there's always a way out.

But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.

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

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn't mean it's not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas.

It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.

I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.

If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself.

Children are a consolation for everthing - except having children.

There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.

We are all aliens to ourselves.

If people never learned the truth about him, then they couldn't turn around and use it against him. The lie was a way of buying protection.

Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that. I am ...

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

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

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

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

Speak now before it is too late, and then hope to go on speaking until there is nothing more to be said.

It was something like the word 'it' in the phrase 'it is raining' or 'it is night'. What that 'it' referred to Quinn had never known

You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books ... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions.

And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man.

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

I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.

I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.

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

A pulverized apple and a pulverized orange are finally the same thing, aren't they? You

A book is a mysterious object, I said, and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen.

Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.

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

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature.

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

Dismantling the architecture of my discontent

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.

You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.

There's progress for you. A bigger and better mousetrap every month. Pretty soon, we'll all be able to kill all the mice at the same time.

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.

The walking wounded, opening their veins and bleeding in public.

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.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

Rather than punch the girl in the face, he abruptly stood up from his seat and walked away.

Most people are participating in the grand adventure of living with one another.

If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics

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

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

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

Poets are everywhere now, but they talk only to each other

Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?

I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.

I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.

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

I know you don't love me but that doesn't mean I'm the wrong girl for you.

The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he's there, he's not really there.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.

I think it's a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.

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

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

Real love ... is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it.

We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.

By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was.

The people closest to him had learned to accept this absence,to treat it as the fundamental quality of his being.

In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.

I really have no interest in myself.

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

But even the facts do not always tell the truth

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

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

There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.

For no word can be written without first having been seen

Brooklyn has a bit of everything - some of the most beautiful things in America, and some of the most wretched, ugly, impoverished things.

The truth of the story lies in the details.

Anything for the truth. No sacrifice is too great.

Just think it, and chances are it will happen.

Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.

I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.

Times i think u were the most cherished trophy i had, but sometimes i think i was the game that you played.

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.

People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.

It was. It will never be again. Remember.