Top 380 Paul Auster Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Expect the unexpected, they say, but once the unexpected happens, the last thing you expect is that it will happen again.”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

53. “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

54. “Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that’s because they don’t know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.”

— Paul Auster

55. “If the world weren’t such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics.”

— Paul Auster

56. “Our lives don’t really belong to us, you see – they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.”

— Paul Auster

57. “He slipped away slowly, withdrawing from this world by small, imperceptible degrees, and in the end it was as if he were a drop of water evaporating in the sun, shrinking and shrinking until at last he wasn’t there anymore.”

— Paul Auster

58. “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.”

— Paul Auster

59. “I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It’s not natural to make art.”

— Paul Auster

60. “My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.”

— Paul Auster

61. “In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life.”

— Paul Auster

62. “That’s all I’ve ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn’t matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That’s the best a man can ever do.”

— Paul Auster

63. “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

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

— Paul Auster

65. “In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.”

— Paul Auster

66. “It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.”

— Paul Auster

67. “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.”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

69. “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

70. “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.”

— Paul Auster

71. “You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.”

— Paul Auster

72. “Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.”

— Paul Auster

73. “Often it’s true that films just go right through us. You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.”

— Paul Auster

74. “I like the sound a typewriter makes.”

— Paul Auster

75. “The best thing about being fifteen is that you don’t have to be fifteen for more than a year.”

— Paul Auster

76. “In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.”

— Paul Auster

77. “If it still shocks me to report what happened, that is because the real is always ahead of what we can imagine. No matter how wild we think our inventions might be, they can never match the unpredictability of what the real world continually spews forth. This lesson seems inescapable to me now. Anything can happen. And one way or another, it always does.”

— Paul Auster

78. “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

79. “Just think it, and chances are it will happen.”

— Paul Auster

80. “Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.”

— Paul Auster

81. “Only God can see the main road and the back road at the same time – which means that only God can know if you made the right choice or the wrong choice.”

— Paul Auster

82. “How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?”

— Paul Auster

83. “The place is New York, the time is the present, and neither one will ever change.”

— Paul Auster

84. “I can never say ‘why’ about anything I do. I suppose I can say ‘how’ and ‘when’ and ‘what.’ But ‘why’ is impenetrable to me.”

— Paul Auster

85. “I don’t think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.”

— Paul Auster

86. “Asking forgiveness from someone is a complicated affair, a delicate balancing act between stiff-necked pride and tearful remorse, and unless you can truly open up to the other person, every apology sounds hollow and false.”

— Paul Auster

87. “In Invisible there’s a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.”

— Paul Auster

88. “For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.”

— Paul Auster

89. “The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

91. “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

92. “He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.”

— Paul Auster

93. “In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.”

— Paul Auster

94. “The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry – actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.”

— Paul Auster

95. “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

96. “I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap.”

— Paul Auster

97. “It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.”

— Paul Auster

98. “Money is the driving force of Hand to Mouth, the lack of money, and all those true stories about strange things in The Red Notebook, coincidences and unlikely events, surprise, the unexpected.”

— Paul Auster

99. “I don’t know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t have to. But it is a compulsion. You don’t choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody.”

— Paul Auster

100. “It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.”

— Paul Auster