Paul Auster Quotes

173 quotes in 2330 categories

• 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…
• The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.
• There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
• We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
• Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.
• You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
• We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are…
• 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…
• Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great…
• I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which…
• I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to…
• I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed…
• 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 started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that…
• I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of…
• I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it…
• 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 you can't get…
• All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however…
• If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
• It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end…

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