Top 380 Paul Auster Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

161. “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

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

— Paul Auster

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Paul Auster

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Paul Auster

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Paul Auster

174. “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

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

— Paul Auster

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Paul Auster

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

192. “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

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

— Paul Auster

194. “From poetry to justice, then. Poetic justice, if you will. For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.”

— Paul Auster

195. “No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That’s what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.”

— Paul Auster

196. “Anger and disappointment could take you just so far, he realized, but without curiosity you were lost.”

— Paul Auster

197. “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

198. “I was extremely shy. And I simply didn’t know how to go about it. It seemed a lot easier to write than to make films. All I needed was a pencil and a piece of paper, whereas filmmaking was something I had no access to.”

— Paul Auster

199. “Your wife tolerates your weaknesses and does not rant or scold, and if she worries, it is only because she wants you to live forever. You count the reasons why you have held her close to you for so many years, and surely this is one of them, one of the bright stars in the vast constellation of enduring love.”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster