Top 380 Paul Auster Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Dismantling the architecture of my discontent.”

— Paul Auster

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Paul Auster

155. “Yes, it is possible that we do not grow up, that even as we grow old, we remain the children we always were. We remember ourselves as we were then, and we feel ourselves to be the same. We made ourselves into what we are now then, and we remain what we were, in spite of the years. We do not change for ourselves. Time makes us grow old, but we do not change.”

— Paul Auster

156. “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

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

— Paul Auster

158. “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

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

— Paul Auster

160. “I want to talk about happiness and well being, about those rare, unexpected moments when the voice in your head goes silent and you feel at one with the world.”

— Paul Auster

161. “The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.”

— Paul Auster

162. “In the deepest, most unalterable sense, he was an invisible man. Invisible to others, and most likely invisible to himself as well. If, while he was alive, I kept looking for him, kept trying to find the father who was not there, now that he is dead I still feel as though I must go on looking for him. Death has not changed anything. The only difference is that I have run out of time.”

— Paul Auster

163. “Anything was possible, and just because things happened in one way didn’t mean they couldn’ t happen in another.”

— Paul Auster

164. “I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.”

— Paul Auster

165. “Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known.”

— Paul Auster

166. “I don’t have all the facts. And I might misremember. As a matter of fact, after I finished Winter Journal, I realized that I’d gotten someone’s name wrong.”

— Paul Auster

167. “You can’t hate something so violently unless a part of you also loves it.”

— Paul Auster

168. “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

169. “In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that, in a funny way, when people are cooped up in rooms they are freer than when they are wandering about in the world.”

— Paul Auster

170. “No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.”

— Paul Auster

171. “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

172. “I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.”

— Paul Auster

173. “It was the first time since his master’s death that he had been able to think about such things without feeling crushed by sorrow, the first time he had understood that memory was a place, a real place that one could visit, and that to spend a few moments among the dead was not necessarily bad for you, that it could in fact be a source of great comfort and happiness.”

— Paul Auster

174. “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

175. “There it was: a full confession. Sherlock Holmes had done it again, and as I marveled at my devastating powers of deduction, I wished there had been two of me so I could have patted myself on the back. I know it sounds arrogant, but how often does one achieve a mental triumph of that magnitude? After listening to her speak just two words, I had nailed the whole bloody thing. If Watson had been there, he would have been shaking his head and muttering under his breath.”

— Paul Auster

176. “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

177. “I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.”

— Paul Auster

178. “I think that’s what turns young men and women into writers – the happiness you discover living in books.”

— Paul Auster

179. “An unreal world was much bigger than a real world, and there was more than enough room in it to be yourself and not yourself at the same time.”

— Paul Auster

180. “Time moved in two directions because every step into the future carried a memory of the past.”

— Paul Auster

181. “La vida nos arrastra de muchas maneras que no podemos controlar y casi nada permanece con nosotros.”

— Paul Auster

182. “All this belongs to the language of ghosts. There are many other possible kinds of talks in this language. Most of them begin when one person says to another: I wish. What they wish for might be anything at all, as long as it is something that cannot happen. I wish the sun would never set. I wish money would grow in my pockets. I wish the city would be like it was in the old days. You get the idea.”

— Paul Auster

183. “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

184. “Yes, she is in love with him, and yes, in spite of his qualms and inner hesitations, he loves her back, however improbable that might seem to him. Note here for the record that he is not someone with a special fixation on young girls. Until now, all the women in his life have been more or less his own age. Pilar therefore does not represent an embodiment of some ideal female type for him – she is merely herself, a small piece of luck he stumbled across one afternoon in a public park, an exception to every rule.”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

186. “I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.”

— Paul Auster

187. “You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget – and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self. So you put down the journal, and little by little, over the course of the next forty-seven years, almost everything was lost.”

— Paul Auster

188. “Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.”

— Paul Auster

189. “Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’”

— Paul Auster

190. “He was not trying to buy happiness, but simply an absence of unhappiness.”

— Paul Auster

191. “I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.”

— Paul Auster

192. “Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.”

— Paul Auster

193. “Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It’s everything at once.”

— Paul Auster

194. “Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.”

— Paul Auster

195. “Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.”

— Paul Auster

196. “That was the real difference, Ferguson concluded. Not too little money or too much money, not what a person did or failed to do, not buying a larger house or a more expensive car, but ambition. That explained why Brownstein and Solomon managed to float through their lives in relative peace – because they weren’t tormented by the curse of ambition.”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

199. “Our lives are no more than the sum of manifold contingencies, and no matter how diverse they might be in their details, they all share an essential randomness in their design: this then that, and because of that, this.”

— Paul Auster

200. “The sky is white. It smells of the earth, and it is not there. The sky is white like the earth, and it smells of yesterday. All this was tomorrow. All this was a hundred years from now.”

— Paul Auster