Paul Auster Quotes

107 Sourced Quotes

You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

Paul Auster
If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.

Paul Auster
Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he's there, he's not really there.

Paul Auster
Prime numbers. It was all so neat and elegant. Numbers that refuse to cooperate, that don't change or divide, numbers that remain themselves for all eternity.

Paul Auster
We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Paul Auster
No one calls at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning unless it is to give news that cannot wait. And news that cannot wait is always bad news.

Paul Auster
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

Paul Auster
You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

Paul Auster
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
As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.

Paul Auster
I didn't say I was afraid of dying,... I said that I was afraid to get on a plane. There is a difference.

Paul Auster
The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

Paul Auster
It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.

Paul Auster
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.

Paul Auster
I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.

Paul Auster
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
I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.

Paul Auster
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
It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.

Paul Auster
In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.

Paul Auster
This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly - with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe.

Paul Auster
The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

Paul Auster
We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

Paul Auster
I feel that the act of writing, in and of itself, is a tool towards probing that which you wouldn't without that pen in your hand. It's a strange, almost neurological phenomenon, and the words seem to generate more words - but only when you're writing. You can't do it in your head.

Paul Auster
Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.

Paul Auster