Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Paul Auster
Paul Auster Quotes
107 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin....Writing as a lesser form of dance.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
That's what makes his story so impossible,.... Because he's told me the truth.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Governments always need enemies, even when they're not at war. If you don't have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word. It scares the population, and when the people are scared, they tend not to step out of line.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man's solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn't really anyone, and I wasn't really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man's book.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said that he was glad to be alive. But at least he did not resent it. He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him - as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
Then, without any warning, we both straightened up, turned towards each other, and began to kiss. After that, it is difficult for me to speak of what happened. Such things have little to do with words, so little, in fact, that it seems almost pointless to try to express them. If anything, I would say that we were falling into each other, that we were falling so fast and so far that nothing could catch us.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the [George W.] Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
It's always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
In the old physics, three times two equals six and two times three equals 6 are reversible propositions. Not in quantum physics. Three times two and two times three are two different matters, distinct and separate propositions.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.
Paul Auster
Source
Report...
I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
Paul Auster
1
2
3
4
Quote of the day
Nobody understood better than Mr. Lincoln the obvious truth that in politics it does not suffice merely to nominate candidates. Something must also be done to elect them.
John George Nicolay
Paul Auster
Creative Commons
Born:
February 3, 1947
Died:
April 30, 2024
(aged 77)
Bio:
Paul Benjamin Auster was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker.
Known for:
The Book of Illusions (2002)
Moon Palace (1989)
The Invention of Solitude (1982)
The Brooklyn Follies (2005)
Timbuktu (1999)
Most used words:
life
happen
man
story
place
books
person
dead
live
sense
solitary
love
day
told
alive
Paul Auster on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Paul Auster Quotes
Paul Auster Short Quotes
American Screenwriter Quotes
Screenwriter Quotes
20th-century Screenwriter Quotes
Related Authors
J. M. Coetzee
South African Linguist
Philip Roth
American Novelist
Family
Siri Hustvedt
Spouse
Lydia Davis
Spouse
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes