Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man. — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art. — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates,… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
I'm generous. I give good tips. It's just - the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don't want anything.… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Don't be a writer, it's a terrible way to live your life, there's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that,… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
When every card in the deck is stacked against you, the only way to win a hand is to break the rules.… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
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… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
I say at the very end of "Winter Journal" that I do dream about my father often. I think I have a… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand,… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets.… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving.… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
“On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to… — Paul Auster Copy Share
“No es que escribir me produzca un gran placer, pero es mucho peor si no lo hago.” — Paul Auster Copy Share
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… — Paul Auster Copy Share
The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count. — Paul Auster Copy Share
“What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him, but a person he had invented, an artificial creature he could… — Paul Auster Copy Share
I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof. — Paul Auster Copy Share
As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true. — Paul Auster Copy Share
Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience. — Paul Auster Copy Share
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… — Paul Auster Copy Share
I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet - an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we… — Paul Auster Copy Share
Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. — Paul Auster Copy Share
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… — Paul Auster Copy Share
“Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect… — Paul Auster Copy Share
