Paul Auster Quotes

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.

Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.

I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.

When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn't mean it's not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas.

Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?

I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.

I think there might be some pressure released while I'm doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.

When I look back at experience [with my father], all I can do is feel pity. You know, how torn he was about how to act, what to say. And it seems an important story to me.

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.

I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it's been a very split kind of response.

I'm in constant inner dialogue with my father still.

Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.

But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.

Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.

We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.

I'm generous. I give good tips. It's just - the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don't want anything. I'm not a consumer. I don't crave objects.

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

It's a mind going over things, revisiting things, maybe trying to refine the original perception. You have to keep going a thing over in order to make sense off it.

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

Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.

I can never say 'why' about anything I do. I suppose I can say 'how' and 'when' and 'what.' But 'why' is impenetrable to me.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

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

...once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.

It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.

What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.

I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.

I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.

Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.

I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don't even have a computer, I don't have a cell phone.

It was. It will never be again. Remember.

I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author.

She's too sad to be beautiful. No one that sad can still be beautiful.

All the happiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.

I know you don't love me but that doesn't mean I'm the wrong girl for you.

I couldn't imagine myself doing it anymore. It was part of my life that had ended for me, and here was my chance to set out on a fresh course

If people never learned the truth about him, then they couldn't turn around and use it against him. The lie was a way of buying protection.

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others.

And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man.

If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself.

Behind all the surface composure, there seemed to be a great darkness: an urge to test himself, to take risks, to haunt the edges of things.

The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives.