All Paul Auster Quotes
- For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more… Closes
- There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in… Change
- Just think it, and chances are it will happen. Chance
- Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour,… Able
- He would conclude that nothing was real except chance. Chance
- Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there,… Business
- Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something… Almost Nothing
- In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that… Chance
- Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in… Caught
- In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns… Abruptly
- At that point, Noriko finally breaks down and begins to cry sobbing into her hands as the floodgates open - this young woman who has… Bad
- Bodies count, of course - they count more than we're willing to admit - but we don't fall in love with bodies, we fall in… Admit
- I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all. All
- But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been. Been
- Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that… End
- Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and… Book
- As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true. Believe
- When every card in the deck is stacked against you, the only way to win a hand is to break the rules. You beg, borrow,… Act
- What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes. Avoid
- The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was… Alive
- He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he… Any
- To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and… Becomes
- Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those… Able
- Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People… Betty
- For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their… Aesthetic