Famous Quotes & Sayings

Paul Auster Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Paul Auster.

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Famous Quotes By Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 132347

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. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 2071086

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1080775

And just then, in one of those unbidden flashes of insight, it occurred to him that nothing was meaningless, that everything in the world was connected to everything else. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 586863

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

Paul Auster Quotes 1687978

I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1827353

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

Paul Auster Quotes 827429

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. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 684795

Everywhere I went during those days, the streets were filled with talk of the Mets. It was one of those rare moments of unanimity when everyone was thinking about the same thing. People walked around with transistor radios tuned to the game, large crowds gathered in front of appliance store windows to watch the action on silent televisions, sudden cheers would erupt from corner bars, from apartment windows, from invisible rooftops. First it was Atlanta in the playoffs, and then it was Baltimore in the Series. Out of eight October games, the Mets lost only once, and when the adventure was over, New York held another ticker-tape parade, this one even surpassing the extravaganza that had been thrown for the astronauts two months earlier. More than five hundred tons of paper fell into the streets that day, a record that has not been match sense. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1676094

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

Paul Auster Quotes 992723

Life got in the way
two years in the army, work, marriage, family responsibilities, the need to earn more and more money, all the muck that bogs us down when we don't have the balls to stand up for ourselves
but I had never lost my interest in books. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1743853

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

Paul Auster Quotes 1377560

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

Paul Auster Quotes 583796

I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I'm writing long sentences now, something I didn't use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1212786

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

Paul Auster Quotes 756919

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

Paul Auster Quotes 484389

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. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1011025

I was perfectly calm and perfectly insane, perfectly prepared to accept what the moment had offered. Indifference of that magnitude is rare and because it can be achieved only by someone ready to let go of who he is, it demands respect. It inspires awe in those who gaze upon it. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 2025871

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

Paul Auster Quotes 986218

People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 483110

I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn't capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1412204

Still, I had a hunch about it, and if there's one thing I've learned in my long and stupid career as a man, it's the importance of listening to my hunches. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1362448

There are five of him there, and yet the nature of the trick photography denies the possibility of eye contact among the various selves. Each one is condemned to go on staring into space, as if under the gaze of the others, but seeing nothing, never able to see anything. It is a picture of death, a portrait of an invisible man. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1655778

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? — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1288437

I don't even own a computer. I write by hand then I type it up on an old manual typewriter. But I cross out a lot - I'm not writing in stone tablets, it's just ink on paper. I don't feel comfortable without a pen or a pencil in my hand. I can't think with my fingers on the keyboard. Words are generated for me by gripping the pen, and pressing the point on the paper. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1960881

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

Paul Auster Quotes 174556

Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1789863

He wants to say. That is to say, he means. As in the French, "vouloir dire," which means, literally, to want to say, but which means, in fact, to mean. He means to say what he wants. He wants to say what he means. He says what he wants to mean. He means what he says. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 804433

There is a double rhythm in all human beings. We are binary beings - two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Two legs for walking. And the heartbeat thumping in our chest mirrors that. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 602588

But the Can Man is still touched in the head, and on nights when the world closes in on him, he still gets down on his hands and knees and howls at the moon. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 817702

Actually, screenplays were much more detailed than what I did in the book In the book I had to invent a style for communicating what the sensation of looking at a film would be, whereas the screenplays I wrote in Paris were actual blueprints for how to do the film, with every gesture, every little movement noted in exhaustive detail. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 977708

I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation ... — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1329842

More often than not, what stirs the imagination is best kept in the imagination, and Gwyn is aware of that, she is wise enough to know that the distance between thought and deed can be enormous, a gulf as large as the world itself. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 876980

She seemed perfect to you, and even during her first attack of vertigo, which you happened to witness when you were six (the two of you climbing up the inner staircase of the Statue of Liberty), you were not alarmed, because she was a good and conscientious mother, and she managed to hide her fear from you by turning the descent into a game: sitting on the stairs together and going down one step at a time, asses on the rungs, laughing all the way to the bottom. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1679179

Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1313765

Do you know what happened the last time a nation listened to a bush?" Honey asks.
No one says a word.
"Its people wandered in the desert for forty years. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 2233718

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

Paul Auster Quotes 1914259

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 2262621

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days ... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.' — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 2073729

I can't remember everything we talked about, but the beginning of that conversation is a lot clearer to me than the end. By the time we came to the last half hour or forty-five minutes, there was so much bourbon in my system that I was actually seeing double. This had never happened to me before, and I had no idea how to bring the world back into focus. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 364840

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. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1830732

If some saw the Indians as living in prelapsarian innocence, there were others who judged them to be savage beasts, devils in the form of men. The discovery of cannibals in the Caribbean did nothing to assuage this opinion. The Spaniards used it as a justification to exploit the natives mercilessly for their own mercantile ends. For if you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behavior towards him. It was not until 1537, with the papal bull of Paul III that the Indians were declared to be true men possessing souls. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1615659

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1610563

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

Paul Auster Quotes 1609289

I am a man, not an angel, and if the grief that overtook me occasionally blurred my vision and led to certain lapses of conduct, that in no way should cast doubt on the truth of my story. Before anyone tries to discredit me by pointing to those stains on my record, I come forward of my own free will and openly pronounce my guilt to the world. These are treacherous times, and I know how easily perceptions can be twisted by a single word spoken into the wrong ear. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1727216

Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1601890

It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice. It is a voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own. It speaks to him in the way a voice might tell stories to a child, and yet at times this voice makes fun of him, or calls him to attention, or curses him in no uncertain terms. At times it willfully distorts the story it is telling him, changing the facts to suit its whims, catering to the interests of drama rather than truth. Then he must speak to it in his own voice and tell it to stop, thus returning it to the silence it came from. At other times it sings to him. At still other times it whispers. And then there are the times it merely hums, or babbles, or cries out in pain. And even when it says nothing, he knows it is still there, and in the silence of this voice that says nothing, he waits for it to speak. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1990091

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

Paul Auster Quotes 2262717

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. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 2206615

Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 2202529

This is very rare for anyone in life to pursue something and that thing being the thing you actually most want to do. It's all about the inner, rather than the outer. Whether people like or don't like my work, read it or don't read it, it's just been a gift from the gods that I've been able to sit at my desk for the last almost 50 years and do the things I've wanted to do. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 2165636

Our lives don't really belong to us, you see
they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 2158638

Try to roll with the punches. Keep your chin up. Don't take any wooden nickels. Vote Democrat in every election. Ride your bike in the park. Dream about my perfect, golden body. Take your vitamins. Drink eight glasses of water a day. Pull for the Mets. Watch a lot of movies. Don't work too hard at your job. Take a trip to Paris with me. Come to the hospital when Rachel has her baby and hold my grandchild in your arms. Brush your teeth after every meal. Don't cross the street on a red light. Defend the little guy. Stick up for yourself. Remember how beautiful you are. Remember how much I love you. Drink one Scotch on the rocks every day. Breathe deeply. Keep your eyes open. Stay away from fatty foods. Sleep the sleep of the just. Remember how much I love you. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 2124024

Orioles fought with tigers, blue jays battled against angels, bear cubs warred with giants, and none of it made any sense. A baseball player was a man, and yet once he joined a team he was turned into an animal, a mutant being, or a spirit who lived in heaven next to God. According — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 2065606

A meal was no more than a fragile defense against the inevitability of the next meal. Food itself could never answer the question of food; it only delayed the moment when the question would have to be asked in earnest. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 2005410

The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be sympathetic and read each word carefully and understand what I'm writing about. I suppose every writer feels this. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1769553

The world wasn't real anymore. Everything in it was a fraudulent copy of what it should have been, and everything that happened in it shouldn't have been happening. For a long time afterward, Ferguson lived under the spell of this illusion, sleepwalking through his days and struggling to fall asleep at night, sick of a world he had stopped believing in, doubting everything that presented itself to his eyes. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1959049

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

Paul Auster Quotes 1951232

Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1889982

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

Paul Auster Quotes 1887840

This came as a revelation, and when I finally had time to absorb it, I wondered how I had managed to live so long without learning this simple thing. I am not talking about desire so much as knowledge, the discovery that two people, through desire, can create a thing more powerful than either of them can create alone. This knowledge changed me, I think, and actually made me feel more human. By belonging to Sophie, I began to feel as though I belonged to everyone else as well. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1854191

I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.
I'm talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That's the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1251124

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

Paul Auster Quotes 1775821

Once you fell in love with her, you
loved her until the day you died. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 341427

I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take ... a kind of demonic joy in writing. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 612388

Even before his death he had been absent, and long ago the people closest to him had learned to accept this absence, to treat it as the fundamental quality of his being. Now that he was gone, it would not be difficult for the world to absorb the fact that he was gone forever. The nature of his life had prepared the world for his death - had been a kind of death by anticipation - and if and when he was remembered, it would be dimly, no more than dimly. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 599618

I think people are trying out ideas with the new technology and it's too early to say where it's going exactly. But again, whether it's digital or paper, it doesn't matter. It's words that somebody is reading and getting an experience out of that reading. That's all that really matters. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 599108

Once we acquired the power to destroy ourselves, the very notion of human life had been altered; even the air we breathed was contaminated with the stench of death. Sachs was hardly the first person to come up with this idea, but considering what happened to him nine days ago, there's a certain eeriness to the obsession, as if it were a kind of deadly pun, a mixed-up word that took root inside him and proliferated beyond his control. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 565940

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

Paul Auster Quotes 479098

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 that happens to us every day. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 464011

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

Paul Auster Quotes 454917

Guilt kept me going. It was impossible not to blame myself for what had happened, but even guilt was a comfort. It was a human feeling, a sign that I was still attached to the same world that other men lived in. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 443605

Winter solstice: the darkest time of the year. No sooner has he woken up in the morning than he feels the day beginning to slip away from him. There is no light to sink his teeth into, no sense of time unfolding. Rather, a feeling of doors being shut, of locks being turned. It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness. The outer world, the tangible world of materials and bodies, has come to seem no more than an emanation of his mind. He feels himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence, as if he were living somewhere to the side of himself - not really here, but not anywhere else either. A feeling of having been locked up, and at the same time of being able to walk through walls. He notes somewhere in the margins of a thought: a darkness in the bones. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 376980

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. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 648846

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

Paul Auster Quotes 337228

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. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 328721

I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 318723

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

Paul Auster Quotes 295620

Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 287310

That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don't happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 277415

Blue thinks of this now as he makes his way across the river, watching black ahead of him and remembering his father and his boyhood out in Gravesend. The old man was a copy, later a detective at the 77th precinct, and life would have been good, Blue thinks, except for the bullet that went through his father's brain in 1927. Twenty years ago, he says to himself, suddenly appalled by the time that has past, wondering if there is a heaven, and if so whether or not he will get to see his father after he dies. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 199202

There was nothing to see, nothing to distract me from succumbing to my fears, and the longer I kept my eyes shut, the more terribly I saw my fears wanted me to see. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 107340

But it would be wrong to say you were unhappy there, for you had no trouble adjusting to your reduced circumstances, you found it invigorating to learn that you could get by on almost nothing, and as long as you were able to write, it made no difference where or how you lived. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1151353

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1514984

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. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1501801

Normal. What did normal mean, Ferguson asked himself , and why wasn't it normal for him to feel the way he did about wanting to kiss and make love to other boys, the sex of one-sex was just as normal and natural as the sex of two-sex sex, maybe even more normal and more natural because a cock was something boys understood better than girls, and therefore it was easier to know what the other person wanted without having to guess, without having to play the courtship and seduction games that could make the sex of two-sex sex confounding, and why did a person have to choose between one or the other, why block out one-half of the humanity in the name of normal or natural when the truth was that everyone was Both, and people and society and the laws and religions of people in different societies were just too afraid to admit it. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1491113

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

Paul Auster Quotes 1460102

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

Paul Auster Quotes 1340382

As I write this now, I realize that even on that first day I had slipped through a hole in the earth, that I was falling into a place where I had never been before. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1255698

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

Paul Auster Quotes 101512

Yes. A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. [ ... ] Consider a word that refers to a thing- " umbrella", for example. [ ... ] Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function. [ ... ] What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? [ ... ] the umbrella ceases to be an umbrella. It has changed into something else. The word, however, has remained the same. Therefore it can no longer express the thing. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1247967

Everything had changed for me, and words that I had never understood before suddenly began to make sense. This came as revelation, and when I finally had time to absorb it, I wondered how I had managed to live so long without learning this simple thing. I am not talking about desire so much as knowledge, the discovery that two people, through desire, can create a thing more powerful than either of them can create alone. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1540873

Since all is plenum, all matter is connected and all movement in the plenum produces some effect on the distant bodies, in proportion to the distance. Hence every body is affected not only by those with which is in contact, and thus feels in some way everything that happens to them; but through them it also feels those that touch the ones with which it is in immediate contact. Hence it follows that the communication extends over any distance whatever. Consequently, every body experiences everything that goes on in the universe, so much so that he who sees everything might read in any body what is happening anywhere, and even what has happened or will happen — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1097913

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

Paul Auster Quotes 1051673

Bluntly and quietly, in a series of simple, forthright sentences, she dismantled the architecture of unhappiness that had been growing up around us for the past several days. She was calling from the office she said, and had to talk in a low voice, 'but if you can hear me, Sid' she began, 'there are four things I want you to know. First, I haven't stopped thinking about you since I left the house this morning. Second, I've decided to have the baby, and we're never going to use the word "abortion" again. Third, don't bother to make dinner. [ ... ] Fourth, make sure Mr. Johnson's ready for action. I'm going to attack you the minute I walk in the door, my love, so be prepared. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 1038171

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

Paul Auster Quotes 947038

Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within ... By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 890765

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

Paul Auster Quotes 730327

When she was three, I sent her to day care for a couple
of hours every morning. After a few weeks, the teacher
called me and said that she was worried about Lucy. When it
was time for the children to have their milk, Lucy would always
hang back until all the other kids had taken a carton before
she'd take one for herself. The teacher didn't understand. Go
get your milk, she'd say to Lucy, but Lucy would always wait
around until there was just one carton left. It took a while for me
to figure it out. Lucy didn't know which carton was supposed to
be her milk. She thought all the other kids knew which ones
were theirs, and if she waited until there was only one carton in
the box, that one had to be hers. Do you see what I'm talking
about, Uncle Nat? She's a little weird - but intelligent weird, if
you know what I mean. Not like anyone else. If I hadn't used
the wordjust, you would have known where I was all along ... — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 703248

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. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes 674721

For the fact is that it takes a great deal of self-confidence for a person to poke fun at himself, and a person with that kind of self-confidence is rarely a fool or a bungler. — Paul Auster