Paul Auster Quotes

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.

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.

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.

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.

You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.

Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.

There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.

Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.

Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.

It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!

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

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.

I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

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.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

I've been very lucky in this second marriage. It's just luck. It's absolute luck. And I can only marvel at it. So many other things could have happened that didn't, so overall I feel blessed.

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.

but even the facts do not always tell the truth

it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

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.

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.

Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.

People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle.

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

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

Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.

How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?

Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.

Fiction creating reality.

Most people are participating in the grand adventure of living with one another.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.

You find the book in the process of doing it. That's the adventure of the job.

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.

Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.

Writing is, after all, a gesture towards other people, giving something to others. And so it's not a completely hermetic exercise. It's really an opening up.

You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, 'Of course they like it. They should like it.'

I never would have thought of that word, "hospitality." I settle into the rhythm of my steps.

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’

I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

I thought I was terrible [to play a cameo] and decided never to act again.

Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.