Paul Auster Quotes
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"The weird world rolls on..." meaning that through all the ups and downs, all the travails that we go through, all the horrors, all the wars, all the deaths, all the cruelties, there's still something that keeps us wanting to wake up the next morning and go on with our lives - to make children, to fall in love, to continue humanity.
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Then, without any warning, we both straightened up, turned towards each other, and began to kiss. After that, it is difficult for me to speak of what happened. Such things have little to do with words, so little, in fact, that it seems almost pointless to try to express them. If anything, I would say that we were falling into each other, that we were falling so fast and so far that nothing could catch us.
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There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.
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You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions.
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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 passion. That is because human beings need stories.
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I thought I was terrible [to play a cameo] and decided never to act again.
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Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.
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When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
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Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.
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How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
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I've been very lucky in this second marriage. It's just luck. It's absolute luck. And I can only marvel at it. So many other things could have happened that didn't, so overall I feel blessed.
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Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
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You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.
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Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was.
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There is a line from the Marina Tsvetaeva poem I'm so fond of: "In this most Christian of worlds/ All poets are Jews." What she means is that writers and artists are outside the normal flow of daily life, the normal flow of society in general.
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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 I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That's always first.
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This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly - with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe.
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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.
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You find the book in the process of doing it. That's the adventure of the job.
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All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.
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Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
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I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.
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I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.
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There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.