Paul Auster Quotes - Page 2

Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.

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

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

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Every man is the author of his own life.

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

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

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

"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.

We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.

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.

One should never underestimate the power of books.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

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

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

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

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.

At that point, Noriko finally breaks down and begins to cry sobbing into her hands as the floodgates open - this young woman who has suffered in silence for so long, this good woman who refuse to believe she's good, for only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves.

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

Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin....Writing as a lesser form of dance.

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.

you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you

Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.

When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.