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People Quotes by Paul Auster

39 People quotes by Paul Auster

All People quotes Paul Auster’s page

Paul Auster observes that the same passage can be called the best thing ever read by one person and completely idiotic by another. He says artists need more than the world, that reading is a physical experience, and that stories appear in books, TV, comics, movies, and radio, giving them to others once finished.

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

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

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I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.

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

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

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In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that,…

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

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I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet - an imaginary character becomes so important to…

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We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate…

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

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Most people just want to be part of the world, they want to live, love, and enjoy themselves - to take part…

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“The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out…

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I know that what's happened in the election has changed American reality, and I understand that I have to change with it.…

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I think people are trying out ideas with the new technology and it's too early to say where it's going exactly. But…

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We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from…

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I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods,…

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Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to…

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I don't like talking about my work at all. I find it very difficult. I never know what to say. It's too…

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People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person…

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I can remember saying again and again and again, "A terrible thing has happened, but this should be a kind of wake-up…

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I say at the very end of "Winter Journal" that I do dream about my father often. I think I have a…

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Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people - more just, more moral, more…

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Human beings need stories, and we're looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it's television, whether it's comic books or…

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

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Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that's wonderful. But when people have built up a sort…

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I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been…

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Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever…

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I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever…

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This is very rare for anyone in life to pursue something and that thing being the thing you actually most want to…

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When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have…

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What if I had been born during a war and I lived in an occupied city, and people were being taken out…

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When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few…

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Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a…

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It's an ethical pact I've made with myself and with the reader - not to invent. And when I can't remember, I…

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Just the fact that Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by such a large number gives some validation to the impulse to…

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Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the…

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What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the…

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Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about…

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I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have…

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More by Paul Auster

“On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to…

“No es que escribir me produzca un gran placer, pero es mucho peor si no lo hago.”

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…

I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me.

The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.

“What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him, but a person he had invented, an artificial creature he could…

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

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

Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say…

I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet - an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we…

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some…

“Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect…

“and cut down many trees. When the Humans”