Paul Auster Quotes

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

But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next.

Every man is the author of his own life.

He has been marked by the past, and once that happens, nothing can bedone about it. Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwi...

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

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

I doubted that I would be able to sleep. There were too many things to digest, too many images churning in my mind, but the moment my head touched the pillow, I began to lose consciousness. I felt as...

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...

I would resurrect that person in words, and once the pages had been printed and the story had been bound between covers, they would have something to hold on to for the rest of their lives. Not only t...

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.

MR. BONES KNEW THAT WILLY WASN'T LONG FOR THIS WORLD. The cough had been inside him for over six months, and by now there wasn't a chance in hell that he would ever get rid of it. Slowly and inexorabl...

Not to me, I said.Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote TheCharterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby-Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on MadameB...

Now that you are living on such intimate terms with her, Gwyn has emerged as a slightly different person... She is both funnier and more salacious than you imagined, more vulgar and idiosyncratic, mor...

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 w...

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 deliv...

The big event that rips through the heart of things and changes life for everyone, the unforgettable moment when something ends and something else begins. Was that what this was, he asked himself, a m...

The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a...

There is also the equal and opposite temptation to look at the world as though it were an extension of the imaginary. [...] Like everyone else, he craves a meaning. Like everyone else his life is so f...

There's an imp inside me, and if I don't let him out to make some mischief now and then, the world just gets too damned dull. I hate feeling grumpy and bored. I'm an enthusiast, and the more dangerous...

This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself.