Paul Auster Quotes
-
In my later novels, I systematically used the convention, and then a moment came - when did it come? With The Book of Illusions, maybe - I thought, I don't need them anymore, I don't need them, I want to integrate the dialogue into the text.
-
That's all I've ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn't matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.
-
I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
-
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 of others.
-
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 die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.
-
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 with it.
-
I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.
-
I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.
-
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 than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself – and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths.
-
Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
-
How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
-
I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.
-
Dismantling the architecture of my discontent
-
Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
-
I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.
-
I thought I was terrible [to play a cameo] and decided never to act again.
-
I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
-
To tell you the truth, I'm not unhappy about it. I'm not even sure that I like the idea of adapting novels into films. It's very difficult to do, and it usually doesn't work. There are exceptions, but generally speaking, one feels disappointed with the result.
-
Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
-
He slipped away slowly, withdrawing from this world by small, imperceptible degrees, and in the end it was as if he were a drop of water evaporating in the sun, shrinking and shrinking until at last he wasn’t there anymore.
-
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 who are able to have them.
-
I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can't tell you how lucky I feel, that I've managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I've been able to do what I want to do.
-
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 the years.
-
Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.