Paul Auster Quotes

107 Sourced Quotes

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
I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.

Paul Auster
If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics

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
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
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
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
The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.

Paul Auster
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
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
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
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
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
No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

Paul Auster
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
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