Top 380 Paul Auster Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

254. “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

255. “Put something in the wrong place, and even though it is still there – quite possibly smack under your nose – it can vanish for the rest of time.”

— Paul Auster

256. “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

257. “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

258. “Brooklyn has a bit of everything – some of the most beautiful things in America, and some of the most wretched, ugly, impoverished things.”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

260. “He learned how to look at himself from a distance, to see himself first of all as a man among other men, then as a collection of random particles of matter, and finally as a single speck of dust – and the farther he traveled from his point of origin, she said, the closer he came to achieving greatness.”

— Paul Auster

261. “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

262. “Adolescence feeds on drama, it is most happy when living in extremis, and Ferguson was no less vulnerable to the lure of high emotion and extravagant unreason than any other boy his age...”

— Paul Auster

263. “There’s an imp inside me, and if I don’t let him out to make some mischief now and then, the world just gets too damned dull. I hate feeling grumpy and bored. I’m an enthusiast, and the more dangerous my life becomes, the happier I am.”

— Paul Auster

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “I stood up from my seat and made my way for the exit downstairs. Outside, the early evening assaulted me with light, surrounded me with sudden warmth. This is what I deserve, I said to myself. I’ve made my nothing, and now I’ve got to live in it.”

— Paul Auster

268. “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

269. “The rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction. I understand now that each fact is nullified by the next fact, that each thought engenders an equal and opposite thought. Impossible to say anything without reservation.”

— Paul Auster

270. “I think if we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.”

— Paul Auster

271. “It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!”

— Paul Auster

272. “The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can’t describe how deeply I love them all.”

— Paul Auster

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

— Paul Auster

274. “For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than this surface to others.”

— Paul Auster

275. “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

276. “Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.”

— Paul Auster

277. “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

278. “The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect.”

— Paul Auster

279. “Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.”

— Paul Auster

280. “Please, go ahead and improve society if you can, but meanwhile people are suffering, and I have a job to do.”

— Paul Auster

281. “There’s a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog – and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! – in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.”

— Paul Auster

282. “To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.”

— Paul Auster

283. “I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand.”

— Paul Auster

284. “For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins.”

— Paul Auster

285. “This came as a revelation, and when I finally had time to absorb it, I wondered how I had managed to live so long without learning this simple thing. I am not talking about desire so much as knowledge, the discovery that two people, through desire, can create a thing more powerful than either of them can create alone. This knowledge changed me, I think, and actually made me feel more human. By belonging to Sophie, I began to feel as though I belonged to everyone else as well.”

— Paul Auster

286. “Find yourself drowning in a sea of trouble, and hard work can become the raft that ends up keeping you afloat.”

— Paul Auster

287. “This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself.”

— Paul Auster

288. “He already understand that the world consisted of two realms, the visible and the invisible, and that the things he couldn’t see were often more real than the things he could.”

— Paul Auster

289. “All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I’m inventing characters, even though it’s fiction, even though it’s make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.”

— Paul Auster

290. “It’s a mind going over things, revisiting things, maybe trying to refine the original perception. You have to keep going a thing over in order to make sense off it.”

— Paul Auster

291. “I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.”

— Paul Auster

292. “I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet – an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we think about them so much that we name a ship after them. The imaginary lives on in the real.”

— Paul Auster

293. “You find the book in the process of doing it. That’s the adventure of the job.”

— Paul Auster

294. “Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.”

— Paul Auster

295. “Most people are participating in the grand adventure of living with one another.”

— Paul Auster

296. “I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.”

— Paul Auster

297. “I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.”

— Paul Auster

298. “Rather than fill me with ecstasy or gladness, this breakthrough overpowered me with dread. I didn’t know myself anymore. I was inhabited by something that wasn’t me, and that thing was so terrible, so alien in its newness, I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. I let the tears come pouring out of me, and once I started, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to stop.”

— Paul Auster

299. “In fifteen years, Sachs traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by the time he came to that last place, I doubt he even knew who he was anymore. So much distance had been covered by then, it wouldn’t have been possible for him to remember where he had begun.”

— Paul Auster

300. “The past, to repeat the words of Proust, is hidden in some material object. To wander about in the world, then, is also to wander about in ourselves.”

— Paul Auster