Paul Auster Quotes

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

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.

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 t...

Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and...

I hear her slip into bed with him, and I hear everything that happens after that. Sex is such a strange and sloppy business, why bother to recount every slurp and moan that ensued? Tom and Honey deser...

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

Everybody make words,' he continued. 'Everybody write things down. Children in school do lessons in my books. Teachers put grades in my books. Love letters sent in envelopes I sell. Ledgers for accoun...

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the most...

And now we get to the hard part. the endings, the farewells, and the famous last words. if you don't hear from me often, remember that you're in my thoughts.

Et ce monde étrange continue de tourner.

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

The difference was not that one was a pessimist and the other an optimist, it was that one's pessimism had led to an ethos of fear, and the other's pessimism had led to a noisy, fractious disdain for...

A lot of film people are like that– especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the grunts. They like putting their hands on the equipment and getting it to do things for them. It's not...

I wasn't able to think about them directly or summon them up in any conscious way, but as I put together their puzzles and played with their Lego pieces, building evermore complex and baroque structur...

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

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

This is what is called speaking. I believe that is the term. When words come out, fly into the air, live for a moment, and die. Strange, is it not? I myself have no opinion. No and no again. But still...

Quinn froze. There was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake. Whatever choice he made--and he had to make a choice--would be arbitrary, a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt hi...