All Paul Auster Quotes
- What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that… Ache
- Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can… Absolute
- In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. Good
- When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all… All
- I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its… All
- Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world. Attempts
- Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of… Belong
- Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have… All
- You find the book in the process of doing it. That's the adventure of the job. Adventure
- Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and… Accept
- Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images. Collapse
- As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy. Boy
- The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine. Ahead
- We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes… Aliens
- Every man is the author of his own life. Author
- No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real. Even Less
- As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out Dream
- No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself Access
- What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books? Been
- Reason and memory are nearly always at odds. Inspirational
- Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it. Asks
- I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books. Book
- I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not… Author
- Even you, who’ve lived inside your body for 64 years, would apparently be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot,… Aliens
- The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy. Challenges