Top 380 Paul Auster Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Such were the contradictions of manhood, Ferguson discovered. Your heart could be broken, but your gonads kept telling you to forget about your heart.”

— Paul Auster

302. “Silence is not a rewarding response, no matter what it means.”

— Paul Auster

303. “For the fact is that it takes a great deal of self-confidence for a person to poke fun at himself, and a person with that kind of self-confidence is rarely a fool or a bungler.”

— Paul Auster

304. “We are all aliens to ourselves.”

— Paul Auster

305. “The grinding search for money can crush the spirit out of you unless you’re made of steel.”

— Paul Auster

306. “I’ve found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience – both physical and mental – and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I’m doing.”

— Paul Auster

307. “As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.”

— Paul Auster

308. “The point is: his life was not centered around the place where he lived. His house was just one of many stopping places in a restless, unmoored existence, and this lack of center had the effect of turning him into a perpetual outsider, a tourist of his own life. You never had the feeling that he could be located.”

— Paul Auster

309. “At fifty-seven, I felt old. Now, at seventy-four, I feel much younger than I did then.”

— Paul Auster

310. “I’ve learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.”

— Paul Auster

311. “I do not repeat conversations that I can’t remember. And it’s something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.”

— Paul Auster

312. “I wasn’t able to think about them directly or summon them up in any conscious way, but as I put together their puzzles and played with their Lego pieces, building evermore complex and baroque structures, I felt that I was temporarily inhabiting them again – carrying on their little phantom lives for them by repeating the gestures they had made when they still had bodies.”

— Paul Auster

313. “No one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him.”

— Paul Auster

314. “I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I’ve never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.”

— Paul Auster

315. “One of the odd things about being himself... was that there seemed to be several of him, that he wasn’t just one person but a collection of contradictory selves, and each time he was with a different person, he himself was different as well.”

— Paul Auster

316. “That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don’t happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered.”

— Paul Auster

317. “I’m an intelligent pessimist, a pessimist who has occasional flashes of optimism. Nearly everything happens for the worst, but not always, you see, nothing is ever always, but i’m always expecting the worst, and when the worst doesn’t happen, I get so excited I begin to sound like an optimist.”

— Paul Auster

318. “They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. Yes, says Blue to himself, that’s what it feels like: like nothing at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough – to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others.”

— Paul Auster

319. “The telephone was not his favorite object, and more than once he had considered getting rid of his. What he disliked most of all was its tyranny. Not only did it have the power to interrupt him against his will, but inevitably he would give in to its command.”

— Paul Auster

320. “The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.”

— Paul Auster

321. “And even if there was an end, it seemed doubtful that I would ever know about it – which meant that the story would go on and on, secreting its poison inside me forever.”

— Paul Auster

322. “Movies are not novels, and that’s why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can’t be done.”

— Paul Auster

323. “Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can’t we?”

— Paul Auster

324. “There’s progress for you. A bigger and better mousetrap every month. Pretty soon, we’ll all be able to kill all the mice at the same time.”

— Paul Auster

325. “For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.”

— Paul Auster

326. “Fiction creating reality.”

— Paul Auster

327. “The best filmmakers, I think, have always had very narrow frameworks for their stories, and then they can go deeply, rather than skimming the surface.”

— Paul Auster

328. “It was the best thing that could have happened to him, it was the worst thing that could have happened to him.”

— Paul Auster

329. “In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I’ve done it, each time I’ve done it I’ve felt deeply immersed in the material as I’m doing it, and then it’s over and everything is the same.”

— Paul Auster

330. “Something was wrong, and while Mr. Bones could scarcely imagine what that thing was, Henry’s sadness was beginning to have an effect on him, and within a matter of minutes he had taken on the boy’s sadness as his own. Such is the was with dogs.”

— Paul Auster

331. “He who lives for an encounter with the unseen becomes the instrument of the seen.”

— Paul Auster

332. “A book is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.”

— Paul Auster

333. “Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination.”

— Paul Auster

334. “George Washington chopped down the tree, and then he threw away the money. Do you understand? He was telling us an essential truth. Namely, that money doesn’t grow on trees. This is what made our country great, Peter. Now George Washington’s picture is on every dollar bill. There is an important lesson to be learned from all this.”

— Paul Auster

335. “I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I’m not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.”

— Paul Auster

336. “People pushed by force of habit, pushed for the pure pleasure of pushing, and they would go on pushing until you showed them you were willing to push back, at which point you would earn their respect.”

— Paul Auster

337. “Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.”

— Paul Auster

338. “When he talks about the world, then, he is referring to his world, to the small, circumscribed sphere of his own life, and not to the world-at-large, which is too large and too broken for him to have any effect on it.”

— Paul Auster

339. “Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can’t really measure degrees of difficulty.”

— Paul Auster

340. “When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.”

— Paul Auster

341. “I doubted that I would be able to sleep. There were too many things to digest, too many images churning in my mind, but the moment my head touched the pillow, I began to lose consciousness. I felt as if I’d been clubbed, as if my skull had been crushed by a stone. Some stories are too terrible, perhaps, and the only way to let them into you is to escape, to turn your back on them and steal off into the darkness.”

— Paul Auster

342. “All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.”

— Paul Auster

343. “It was filled with books. That was the first thing I noticed when I went in – how many books there were. Three of the four walls were lined with shelves from the floor to the ceiling, and every inch of those shelves was crammed with books. There were further clusters and piles of them on chairs and tables, on the rug, on the desk. Hardcovers and paperbacks, new books and old books.”

— Paul Auster

344. “The boundaries of my world had shrunk, but I was still alive, and as long as I could go on breathing and farting and thinking my thoughts, what difference did it make where I was?”

— Paul Auster

345. “I haven’t done any translating for decades now. It’s something I did when I was young.”

— Paul Auster

346. “Of all the interpretations I’ve considered over the years, this is the one I like best. That doesn’t mean it’s true, but as long as it could be true, it pleases me to think it is.”

— Paul Auster

347. “As the book progresses, it takes on a more and more unstable character – filled with unpredictable associations and departures, marked by increasingly rapid shifts in tone – until you reach a point where you feel the whole thing being to levitate, to rise ponderously off the ground like some gigantic weather balloon. By the last chapter, you’ve traveled so high up into the air, you realize that you can’t come down again without falling, without being crushed.”

— Paul Auster

348. “Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night... Lying is a bad thing. It makes you sorry you were ever born. And not to have been born is a curse. You are condemned to live outside time. And when you live outside time, there is no day and night. You don’t get a chance to die.”

— Paul Auster

349. “Toda vida es inexplicable. Por muchos hechos que se cuenten, por muchos datos que se muestren, lo esencial se resiste a ser contado.”

— Paul Auster

350. “It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance.”

— Paul Auster