Paul Auster Quotes

107 Sourced Quotes

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
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 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
Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: 'Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe'

Paul Auster
The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.

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

Paul Auster
Money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.

Paul Auster
Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.

Paul Auster
It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.

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

Paul Auster
Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.

Paul Auster
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
I don't like talking about my work at all. I find it very difficult. I never know what to say. It's too close to me, and there's so many things happening unconsciously while I'm working that I'm not aware of, and people will point these things out to me, and I'll say, "That's interesting." But I don't know what to make of it.

Paul Auster
As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.

Paul Auster
What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

Paul Auster
I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.

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