Top 380 Paul Auster Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “I don’t want to use quotation marks anymore, I’ve gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn’t use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.”

— Paul Auster

203. “I’m in constant inner dialogue with my father still.”

— Paul Auster

204. “It was something like the word ‘it’ in the phrase ‘it is raining’ or ‘it is night’. What that ‘it’ referred to Quinn had never known.”

— Paul Auster

205. “After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

207. “Perhaps when we shrink down to almost nothing, we will at last find one another. Life is, after all, very difficult. Most of us die here simply because we forget to breathe.”

— Paul Auster

208. “People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.”

— Paul Auster

209. “I’ve made my nothing, and now I’ve got to live in it.”

— Paul Auster

210. “For me, books were not the containers of words so much as the words themselves, and the value of a given book was determined by its spiritual quality rather than its physical condition.”

— Paul Auster

211. “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

212. “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

213. “And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man.”

— Paul Auster

214. “The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.”

— Paul Auster

215. “The world wasn’t real anymore. Everything in it was a fraudulent copy of what it should have been, and everything that happened in it shouldn’t have been happening. For a long time afterward, Ferguson lived under the spell of this illusion, sleepwalking through his days and struggling to fall asleep at night, sick of a world he had stopped believing in, doubting everything that presented itself to his eyes.”

— Paul Auster

216. “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

217. “No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.”

— Paul Auster

218. “Once a man begins to recognize himself in another, he can no longer look on that person as a stranger.”

— Paul Auster

219. “Once you turn against yourself, it’s hard not to believe that everyone else is against you, too.”

— Paul Auster

220. “Everything is connected to everything else, every story overlaps with every other story.”

— Paul Auster

221. “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

222. “I never would have thought of that word, “hospitality.” I settle into the rhythm of my steps.”

— Paul Auster

223. “He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny. As he put it in his journal that night: If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of destroying it.”

— Paul Auster

224. “In the interim, in the void between the moment he opens the door and the moment he begins to reconquer the emptiness, his mind flails in a wordless panic. It is as if he were being forced to watch his own disappearance, as if, by crossing the threshold of his room, he were entering another dimension, taking up residence inside a black hole.”

— Paul Auster

225. “In the long run, stories are probably no less valuable than money, but in the short run they have their decided limitations.”

— Paul Auster

226. “It’s like a mathematical law, Grace.”

— Paul Auster

227. “Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.”

— Paul Auster

228. “A book is a mysterious object, I said, and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen.”

— Paul Auster

229. “If you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behavior towards him.”

— Paul Auster

230. “They had come to the end of what they could talk about. Beyond that point there was nothing: the random thoughts of men who knew nothing.”

— Paul Auster

231. “I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.”

— Paul Auster

232. “No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood.”

— Paul Auster

233. “Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity.”

— Paul Auster

234. “I’m not going to apologize for things that need no apology.”

— Paul Auster

235. “But that was the beauty of this particular game. The moment you lost, you won.”

— Paul Auster

236. “For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.”

— Paul Auster

237. “Thoughts are real’, he said. ‘Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren’t aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that’s what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future’.”

— Paul Auster

238. “I learned that freedom can be dangerous. If you don’t watch out, it can kill you.”

— Paul Auster

239. “He did not seem to be a man occupying space, but rather a block of impenetrable space in the forum of a man. The world bounced off him, shattered against him, at times adhered to him – but it never got through.”

— Paul Auster

240. “I think most writers can’t really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that’s probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.”

— Paul Auster

241. “How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesnt believe that, about other possibilities?”

— Paul Auster

242. “I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can’t tell you how lucky I feel, that I’ve managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I’ve been able to do what I want to do.”

— Paul Auster

243. “Each book I’ve done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.”

— Paul Auster

244. “But laugh laugh at me Men from around the world especially people from here For there are so many things I don’t dare tell you So many things you wouldn’t let me say Have pity on me.”

— Paul Auster

245. “What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.”

— Paul Auster

246. “Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.”

— Paul Auster

247. “I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.”

— Paul Auster

248. “By that point, of course, the girl no longer misses the doll. He has given her something else instead, and by the time those three weeks are up, the letters have cured her of her unhappiness. She has the story, and 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

249. “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

250. “I can’t remember everything we talked about, but the beginning of that conversation is a lot clearer to me than the end. By the time we came to the last half hour or forty-five minutes, there was so much bourbon in my system that I was actually seeing double. This had never happened to me before, and I had no idea how to bring the world back into focus.”

— Paul Auster