Paul Auster Quotes

173 quotes in 2330 categories

• Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.
• There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.
• You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time,…
• 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 an…
• All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
• Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.
• Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over…
• 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…
• Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.
• 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…
• For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
• Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
• I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.
• 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.
• I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
• I like the sound a typewriter makes.
• I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.
• I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.
• I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
• I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

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