All Paul Auster Quotes
- 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. Call
- 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… Beautiful
- 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… Book
- Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years. Always Thinks
- 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… Bit
- For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names. All
- Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared. Completely
- I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much. Barely
- 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. Funny
- I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly. Exactly
- I like the sound a typewriter makes. Inspirational
- I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing. Book
- 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. Age
- I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive. Alive
- I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious. Always Curious
- Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life. Becomes
- People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is. Arbitrary
- Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty. Degrees
- I'm generous. I give good tips. It's just - the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don't want anything. I'm not a… Consumer
- Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It… Adapt
- No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much… Aesthetic
- The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a… Book
- The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we… Chance
- Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father… Ardently
- We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen… Bottom