Top 380 Paul Auster Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Dismantling the architecture of my discontent.”

— Paul Auster

152. “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

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

— Paul Auster

154. “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

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

— Paul Auster

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— 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. “Come sono felice quando penso a tutti i libri che ancora non ho letto, centinaia, migliaia di libri. Quante cose belle mi aspettano!”

— Paul Auster

162. “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

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

— Paul Auster

164. “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

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

— Paul Auster

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Paul Auster

185. “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

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. “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

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

— Paul Auster

189. “Farts come from no one and nowhere; they are anonymous emanations that belong to the group as a whole, and even when every person in the room can point to the culprit, the only sane course of action is denial.”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

191. “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

192. “I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water. The man in the black clothes taught me how to do it, and I’m not going to pretend I learned that trick overnight.”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

194. “History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.”

— Paul Auster

195. “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

196. “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

197. “I’m looking for oblivion, Doctor, not death. The drugs will put me to sleep, and as long as I’m unconscious, I won’t have to think about what I’m doing. I’ll be there, but I won’t be there, and to the degree that I’m not there, I’ll be protected.”

— Paul Auster

198. “Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it.”

— Paul Auster

199. “Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present. If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of himself, but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory. It is a way of living one’s life so that nothing is ever lost.”

— Paul Auster

200. “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.”

— Paul Auster