Paul Auster Quotes

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.

Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.

It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.

One should never underestimate the power of books.

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

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

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

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can't describe how deeply I love them all.

As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out

Every man is the author of his own life.

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

Dismantling the architecture of my discontent

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

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.

you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you

The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy.

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

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

We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

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

Money is the driving force of Hand to Mouth, the lack of money, and all those true stories about strange things in The Red Notebook, coincidences and unlikely events, surprise, the unexpected.

No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.

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.

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.

We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.

The truth of the story lies in the details.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.

You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.

No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself

It's like a mathematical law, Grace.

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.