Explore a treasure trove of wisdom and insight from Paul Auster through their most impactful and thought-provoking quotes and sayings. Broaden your horizons with their inspiring words and share these beautiful quote pictures from Paul Auster with your friends and followers on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blog - all free of charge. Delve into our collection of the top 221 Paul Auster quotes, handpicked for you to discover and share with others.

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence. By Paul Auster

You can't punish someone for a lack of affection, can you? You can't force a child to love you just because he's your child. By Paul Auster

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. By Paul Auster

If people never learned the truth about him, then they couldn't turn around and use it against him. The lie was a way of buying protection. By Paul Auster

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience. By Paul Auster

It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do. By Paul Auster

Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise. By Paul Auster

You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, 'Of course they like it. They should like it.' By Paul Auster

The grinding search for money can crush the spirit out of you unless you're made of steel. By Paul Auster

I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future. By Paul Auster

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are. By Paul Auster

Speak now before it is too late, and then hope to go on speaking until there is nothing more to be said. By Paul Auster

I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work. By Paul Auster

I couldn't imagine myself doing it anymore. It was part of my life that had ended for me, and here was my chance to set out on a fresh course By Paul Auster

The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future. By Paul Auster

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, he's not really there. By Paul Auster

She's too sad to be beautiful. No one that sad can still be beautiful. By Paul Auster

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. By Paul Auster

Pity is such an awful, useless emotion- you have to bottle it up and keep it to yourself.The moment you try to express it, it only makes things worse. By Paul Auster

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do. By Paul Auster

As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true. By Paul Auster

She'd seen the spark in his fledgling soul, and no one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him. By Paul Auster

You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you. By Paul Auster

A good sense of humor, then, a taste for the ironies of life, and an appreciation of the absurd. By Paul Auster

One very big album, bound in expensive leather with a gold-stamped title on the cover - This is our life: The Austers - was totally blank inside. By Paul Auster

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. By Paul Auster

Shit is a serious business, and anyone caught dumping it in the streets is arrested. With By Paul Auster

All the happiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room. By Paul Auster

Rather than punch the girl in the face, he abruptly stood up from his seat and walked away. By Paul Auster

My mind was a blithering gush, a pandemonium of rhapsodic thoughts. By Paul Auster

What keeps me up at night? Anxiety. Anxiety, the inability to go to sleep, it's quite literally that. By Paul Auster

When a man feels he has come to the end of his rope, it is perfectly natural that he should want to scream. By Paul Auster

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence. By Paul Auster

I never would have thought of that word, "hospitality." I settle into the rhythm of my steps. By Paul Auster

It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket. By Paul Auster

Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant. By Paul Auster

As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy. By Paul Auster

In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister. By Paul Auster

I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am. By Paul Auster

Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land. By Paul Auster

If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything. By Paul Auster

But that was the beauty of this particular game. The moment you lost, you won. By Paul Auster

I think there might be some pressure released while I'm doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same. By Paul Auster

It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up. By Paul Auster

I was looking for a quiet place to die. By Paul Auster

There's progress for you. A bigger and better mousetrap every month. Pretty soon, we'll all be able to kill all the mice at the same time. By Paul Auster

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names. By Paul Auster

Real love ... is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it. By Paul Auster

You had to invent something. It's not possible to leave it blank. The mindwon't let you. By Paul Auster

Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that. I am ... By Paul Auster

[...] one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success. By Paul Auster

You must get used to doing with as little as you can. By wantingless, you are content with less, and the less you need, the betteroff you are. By Paul Auster

Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world. By Paul Auster

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much. By Paul Auster

Behind all the surface composure, there seemed to be a great darkness: an urge to test himself, to take risks, to haunt the edges of things. By Paul Auster

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 it is played out. By Paul Auster

I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive. By Paul Auster

Wherever he was, I was with him now. I had given him my word to say nothing, and the longer I kept his secret, the less I belonged to myself. By Paul Auster

Would it not be better to learn the truth once and for all instead of living in a state of perpetual uncertainty? By Paul Auster

We find ourselves only by looking to what we're not. By Paul Auster

He was not trying to buy happiness, but simply an absence of unhappiness. By Paul Auster

If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself. By Paul Auster

I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear. By Paul Auster

But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been. By Paul Auster

Brooklyn has a bit of everything - some of the most beautiful things in America, and some of the most wretched, ugly, impoverished things. By Paul Auster

I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books. By Paul Auster

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else. By Paul Auster

Every man is the author of his own life. By Paul Auster

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am. By Paul Auster

How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event? By Paul Auster

No one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him. That By Paul Auster

And that's finally all anyone wants out of a book- to be amused By Paul Auster

Things happen in their own sweet time. By Paul Auster

In the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself. Which is as much as to say: lives make no sense. By Paul Auster

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. By Paul Auster

By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. By Paul Auster

Expect the unexpected, they say, but once the unexpected happens, the last thing you expect is that it will happen again. By Paul Auster

I've made my nothing, and now I've got to live in it. By Paul Auster

When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn't mean it's not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas. By Paul Auster

Just think it, and chances are it will happen. By Paul Auster

You can survive only if nothing is necessary to you By Paul Auster

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds. By Paul Auster

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. By Paul Auster

Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. By Paul Auster

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared. By Paul Auster

I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else. By Paul Auster

All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works. By Paul Auster

He who lives for an encounter with the unseen becomes the instrument of the seen. By Paul Auster

Our hearts know what is in them, even if our mouths remain silent. And the world will know what it is, even when nothing remains in our hearts. By Paul Auster

It was a dizzying prospect - to imagine all that freedom, to understand how little it mattered what choice he made. By Paul Auster

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead. By Paul Auster

It was something like the word 'it' in the phrase 'it is raining' or 'it is night'. What that 'it' referred to Quinn had never known By Paul Auster

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them. By Paul Auster

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world. By Paul Auster

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly. By Paul Auster

It's like a mathematical law, Grace. By Paul Auster

Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination. By Paul Auster

When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound. By Paul Auster

All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that. By Paul Auster

For no word can be written without first having been seen By Paul Auster

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen. By Paul Auster

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images. By Paul Auster

Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man. By Paul Auster

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly. By Paul Auster

Once you fell in love with her, youloved her until the day you died. By Paul Auster

The walking wounded, opening their veins and bleeding in public. By Paul Auster

Times i think u were the most cherished trophy i had, but sometimes i think i was the game that you played. By Paul Auster

The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count. By Paul Auster

Money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word. By Paul Auster

The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives. By Paul Auster

Intellectuals suck, Nathan. They are the most boring people in the world. By Paul Auster

A book is a mysterious object, I said, and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen. By Paul Auster

When I'm writing, I don't feel neurotic. So it's better for the family if I'm working. By Paul Auster

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. By Paul Auster

I haven't done any translating for decades now. It's something I did when I was young. By Paul Auster

People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is. By Paul Auster

I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. By Paul Auster

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature. By Paul Auster

Children are a consolation for everthing - except having children. By Paul Auster

There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not. By Paul Auster

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes. By Paul Auster

I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious. By Paul Auster

What at first had seemed to be no more than a small bump in the road was turned into a full-scale misfortune By Paul Auster

It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions. By Paul Auster

an exercise in the art of paying attention, and paying attention, Ferguson discovered, was the first step in learning how to be alive. By Paul Auster

We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since. By Paul Auster

I know you don't love me but that doesn't mean I'm the wrong girl for you. By Paul Auster

The Adlers were diminishing. They had begun to look like one of those families in which no one got to be very old. By Paul Auster

I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels. By Paul Auster

In my studio, it is unkempt and unattractive. Once I'm in my work, I don't notice where I am. By Paul Auster

In the long run, stories are probably no less valuable than money, but in the short run they have their decided By Paul Auster

Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life. By Paul Auster

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time. By Paul Auster

In certain waya it was easy for others to take advantage of him. He refused to complain about anything. By Paul Auster

As long as you're dreaming, there's always a way out. By Paul Auster

I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof. By Paul Auster

Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough. By Paul Auster

Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it. By Paul Auster

I'm in constant inner dialogue with my father still. By Paul Auster

Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once. By Paul Auster

I thought I was terrible [to play a cameo] and decided never to act again. By Paul Auster

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. By Paul Auster

I think it's a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar. By Paul Auster

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. By Paul Auster

The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle. By Paul Auster

I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say. By Paul Auster

I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author. By Paul Auster

At fifty-seven, I felt old. Now, at seventy-four, I feel much younger than I did then. By Paul Auster

A pulverized apple and a pulverized orange are finally the same thing, aren't they? You By Paul Auster

You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books ... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions. By Paul Auster

A steady fuck is good for you. By Paul Auster

The best filmmakers, I think, have always had very narrow frameworks for their stories, and then they can go deeply, rather than skimming the surface. By Paul Auster

[Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer. By Paul Auster

The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect. By Paul Auster

As says who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true. By Paul Auster

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books? By Paul Auster

There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels. By Paul Auster

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life. By Paul Auster

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing. By Paul Auster

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years. By Paul Auster

We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible. By Paul Auster

I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan. By Paul Auster

Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them. By Paul Auster

Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we? By Paul Auster

I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself. By Paul Auster

The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course. By Paul Auster

The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others. By Paul Auster

[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds ... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that. By Paul Auster

One day there is life ... and then, suddenly, it happens there is death By Paul Auster

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away. By Paul Auster

The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy. By Paul Auster

Once a man begins to recognize himself in another, he can no longer look on that person as a stranger. By Paul Auster

There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads. By Paul Auster

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth. By Paul Auster

Most people are participating in the grand adventure of living with one another. By Paul Auster

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty. By Paul Auster

You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky. By Paul Auster

I've always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil - especially for corrections. By Paul Auster

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. By Paul Auster

It was the best thing that could have happened to him, it was the worst thing that could have happened to him. By Paul Auster

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real. By Paul Auster

What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook? By Paul Auster

I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has. By Paul Auster

And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man. By Paul Auster

I like the sound a typewriter makes. By Paul Auster

I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months. By Paul Auster

If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics By Paul Auster

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing. By Paul Auster

It was. It will never be again. Remember. By Paul Auster

For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read. By Paul Auster

We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously. By Paul Auster

There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round. By Paul Auster

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever. By Paul Auster

You find the book in the process of doing it. That's the adventure of the job. By Paul Auster

It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done! By Paul Auster

Anything for the truth. No sacrifice is too great. By Paul Auster

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance. By Paul Auster

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read. By Paul Auster

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 own integrity. By Paul Auster

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body. By Paul Auster

The truth of the story lies in the details. By Paul Auster

the closest man can come to the feeling of eternity is by living in the present By Paul Auster

After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years. By Paul Auster

Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since. By Paul Auster

If you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behavior towards him. By Paul Auster

Better to wait quietly in their corner, they think, than to be dashedagainst the stones. By Paul Auster

Poets are everywhere now, but they talk only to each other By Paul Auster

But even the facts do not always tell the truth By Paul Auster

I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art. By Paul Auster

The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine. By Paul Auster

The people closest to him had learned to accept this absence,to treat it as the fundamental quality of his being. By Paul Auster

He wondered why he turned so sentimental. That's what happened when you have no one to talk to. By Paul Auster

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it. By Paul Auster

Dismantling the architecture of my discontent By Paul Auster

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I questionwhether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all. By Paul Auster

They had come to the end of what they could talk about. Beyond that point there was nothing: the random thoughts of men who knew nothing. By Paul Auster

As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out By Paul Auster

I really have no interest in myself. By Paul Auster

We are all aliens to ourselves. By Paul Auster

Every book is an image of solitude. By Paul Auster

Peace on earth, good will toward men. Piss on earth, good will toward none. By Paul Auster