Top 380 Paul Auster Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “There is a double rhythm in all human beings. We are binary beings – two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Two legs for walking. And the heartbeat thumping in our chest mirrors that.”

— Paul Auster

102. “We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.”

— Paul Auster

103. “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.”

— Paul Auster

104. “Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.”

— Paul Auster

105. “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

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

— Paul Auster

107. “When you live in the city, you learn to take nothing for granted. Close your eyes for a moment, turn around to look at something else, and the thing that was before you is suddenly gone. Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you mustn’t waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.”

— Paul Auster

108. “New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost.”

— Paul Auster

109. “It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.”

— Paul Auster

110. “Most people just want to be part of the world, they want to live, love, and enjoy themselves – to take part in the world around them. Whereas artists are always retreating, locking the door, and inventing other worlds.”

— Paul Auster

111. “Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.”

— Paul Auster

112. “We’re outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we’re there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.”

— Paul Auster

113. “What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?”

— Paul Auster

114. “Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that’s wonderful. But when people have built up a sort of resentment or animosity for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, they read in bad faith.”

— Paul Auster

115. “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.”

— Paul Auster

116. “As Uncle Victor had once told me long ago, a conversation is like having a catch with someone. A good partner tosses the ball directly into your glove, making it almost impossible for you to miss it; when he is on the receiving end, he catches everything sent his way, even the most errant and incompetent throws.”

— Paul Auster

117. “The gods looked down from their mountain and shrugged.”

— Paul Auster

118. “If there is nothing, then, but silence, is it not presumptuous of me to speak? And yet, if there had been anything more than silence, would I have felt the need to speak in the first place?”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

120. “Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.”

— Paul Auster

121. “In the end, the problem is not so much that people forget, but that they do not always forget the same thing. What still exists as a memory for one person can be irretrievably lost for another, and this creates difficulties, insuperable barriers against understanding.”

— Paul Auster

122. “Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn’t waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.”

— Paul Auster

123. “I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.”

— Paul Auster

124. “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

125. “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.”

— Paul Auster

126. “Una mentira nunca puede deshacerse. Ni siquiera la verdad es suficiente.”

— Paul Auster

127. “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

128. “As says who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that’s true.”

— Paul Auster

129. “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

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

— Paul Auster

131. “All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.”

— Paul Auster

132. “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

133. “There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don’t know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It’s only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.”

— Paul Auster

134. “I’m not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don’t even have a computer, I don’t have a cell phone.”

— Paul Auster

135. “Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.”

— Paul Auster

136. “I think there might be some pressure released while I’m doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.”

— Paul Auster

137. “I’ve been very lucky in this second marriage. It’s just luck. It’s absolute luck. And I can only marvel at it. So many other things could have happened that didn’t, so overall I feel blessed.”

— Paul Auster

138. “Even before his death he had been absent, and long ago the people closest to him had learned to accept this absence, to treat it as the fundamental quality of his being. Now that he was gone, it would not be difficult for the world to absorb the fact that he was gone forever. The nature of his life had prepared the world for his death – had been a kind of death by anticipation – and if and when he was remembered, it would be dimly, no more than dimly.”

— Paul Auster

139. “But I know nothing of time. I am new every day. I am born when I wake up in the morning, I grow old during the day, and I die at night when I go to sleep. It is not my fault. And I am doing so well today. I am doing so much better than I have ever done before.”

— Paul Auster

140. “I cannot say who I will be tomorrow. Each day is new, and each day I am born again. I see hope everywhere, even in the dark, and when I die, I will perhaps become God.”

— Paul Auster

141. “We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.”

— Paul Auster

142. “Everything solid for a time, and then the sun comes up one morning and the world begins to melt.”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

144. “I’m saying you’ll never know if you made the wrong choice or not. You would need to have all the facts before you knew, and the only way to get all the facts is to be in two places at the same time – which is impossible.”

— Paul Auster

145. “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

146. “It’s always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there.”

— Paul Auster

147. “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

148. “Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.”

— Paul Auster

149. “I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I’m not thinking about my own life.”

— Paul Auster

150. “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