Paul Auster Quotes

but even the facts do not always tell the truth

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

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to...

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anythi...

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

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one ...

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in contr...

Behind all the surface composure, there seemed to be a great darkness: an urge to test himself, to t...

Everybody make words,' he continued. 'Everybody write things down. Children in school do lessons in ...

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or ju...

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

Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or com...

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

This is what is called speaking. I believe that is the term. When words come out, fly into the air, ...

And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into t...

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour a...

Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but p...

My French was neither good nor bad. I had enough to understand what people said to me, but speaking ...

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be sa...

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

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating con...

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was...

…but the truly frightening thing was to learn that his mother was no stronger than he was, that the ...

(...) Taking the journalist's vow of impartiality and objectivity was not unlike joining an order of...

Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night...Lying is a bad thing. It makes ...

Quinn froze. There was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake. Whatever choice he made-...

Would it be possible, he wondered, to stand up before the world and with the utmost conviction spew ...

I couldn't imagine myself doing it anymore. It was part of my life that had ended for me, and here w...

Words tend to last a big longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures t...

I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now ...

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

I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in...

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

I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to l...

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure p...

Bit by bit, I found myself relaxing into the conversation. Kitty had a natural talent for drawing pe...

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poe...

You’re a dreamer, boy,” he said. “Your mind is on the moon, and from the looks of things, it’s never...

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “s...

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

Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground a...

That's how it is with want. As long as you lack something you yearn for it without cease. if only I ...

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

That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don’t happen...

[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels...

A lot of film people are like that– especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the gr...

I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go o...

I was perfectly calm and perfectly insane, perfectly prepared to accept what the moment had offered....

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

There it was: a full confession. Sherlock Holmes had done it again, and as I marveled at my devastat...

I hear her slip into bed with him, and I hear everything that happens after that. Sex is such a stra...

As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his ow...

Try to roll with the punches. Keep your chin up. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Vote Democrat in eve...

it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-...

The truth of the story lies in the details.

It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice. It is a voice that speaks inside him,...

If people never learned the truth about him, then they couldn't turn around and use it against him. ...

I always sense the future, the antithesis of everything is always before my eyes. I have never seen ...

And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some pu...

Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the pas...

It was. It will never be again. Remember.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of m...

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

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this ove...

Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how ...

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when w...

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his ...

In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even ...

For several years Quinn had been having the same conversations with this man, whose name he did not ...

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

I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves...

Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice...

The difference was not that one was a pessimist and the other an optimist, it was that one's pessimi...

And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the se...

Something was wrong, and while Mr. Bones could scarcely imagine what that thing was, Henry's sadness...

These are treacherous times, and I know how easily perceptions can be twisted by a single word spoke...

You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out ther...