110+ Paul Auster Quotes On Imaginative, Introspective And Poetic

Paul Auster is an American author of essays, screenplays, and novels. He is best known for his New York Trilogy, which consists of three novels: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. His works often deal with themes of existentialism, identity, and isolation, often set in his home city of New York. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Paul Auster on love, imaginative, introspective.

Top 10 Paul Auster Quotes

1. There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.
2. One should never underestimate the power of books.
3. It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.
4. Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.
5. It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
6. Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.
7. As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
8. The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
9. All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.
10. Dismantling the architecture of my discontent

Paul Auster Short Quotes

• You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
• To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.
• I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.
• I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
• I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.
• I haven't done any translating for decades now. It's something I did when I was young.
• I thought I was terrible [to play a cameo] and decided never to act again.
• Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.
• Most people are participating in the grand adventure of living with one another.
• I never would have thought of that word, "hospitality." I settle into the rhythm of my steps.

Paul Auster Quotes About Love

Most people just want to be part of the world, they want to live, love, and enjoy themselves - to take part in the world around them. Whereas artists are always retreating, locking the door, and inventing other worlds. — Paul Auster

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

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

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can't describe how deeply I love them all. — Paul Auster

I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes About Imaginative

Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a writer writes can excite the imagination and the feelings of the reader, then that reader carries it around forever. Nothing is more vivid than good fiction. — Paul Auster

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

Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes About Person

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. — Paul Auster

Farts come from no one and nowhere; they are anonymous emanations that belong to the group as a whole, and even when every person in the room can point to the culprit, the only sane course of action is denial. — Paul Auster

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. — Paul Auster

You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either. — Paul Auster

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 dead man´s book. — Paul Auster

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

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

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

In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for. — Paul Auster

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 About Guess

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went. — Paul Auster

I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly the relationship between the man who finds the briefcase and the woman whose husband owned the briefcase. It's quite a beautiful passage. — Paul Auster

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children. — Paul Auster

I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore. — Paul Auster

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

Paul Auster Quotes About Turned

I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films. — Paul Auster

I hate reading digital books. I don't enjoy the experience. I like smelling the paper, turning the pages. I think the book as we've always known it is an efficient technology. — Paul Auster

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

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

I don't know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn't hurt the book. — Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes About Novels

The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up. — 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. — Paul Auster

I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal. — Paul Auster

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist. — 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. — Paul Auster

In my later novels, I systematically used the convention, and then a moment came - when did it come? With The Book of Illusions, maybe - I thought, I don't need them anymore, I don't need them, I want to integrate the dialogue into the text. — Paul Auster

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

There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction. — Paul Auster

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

Paul Auster Famous Quotes And Sayings

And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is. — Paul Auster

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head. — Paul Auster

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world. — Paul Auster

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. — Paul Auster

It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me. — Paul Auster

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this. — Paul Auster

Bodies count, of course - they count more than we're willing to admit - but we don't fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other. We all know that, but the moment we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, unsubstantial metaphors. — Paul Auster

Money is the driving force of Hand to Mouth, the lack of money, and all those true stories about strange things in The Red Notebook, coincidences and unlikely events, surprise, the unexpected. — Paul Auster

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

As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice. — Paul Auster

No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself — 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. — Paul Auster

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. — Paul Auster

Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that's wonderful. But when people have built up a sort of resentment or animosity for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, they read in bad faith. — Paul Auster

This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly - with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe. — Paul Auster

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

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose. — Paul Auster

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude — Paul Auster

Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible. — Paul Auster

Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days. — Paul Auster

He slipped away slowly, withdrawing from this world by small, imperceptible degrees, and in the end it was as if he were a drop of water evaporating in the sun, shrinking and shrinking until at last he wasn’t there anymore. — Paul Auster

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

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

In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other. — Paul Auster

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

In the old physics, three times two equals six and two times three equals 6 are reversible propositions. Not in quantum physics. Three times two and two times three are two different matters, distinct and separate propositions. — Paul Auster

I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing. — Paul Auster

I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began. — Paul Auster

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

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

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. — Paul Auster

I think the act of talking about something - with a friend, or someone in your family, or someone you care about, and you're discussing something that you both admire - can often sharpen your thoughts about what you've read or seen and help you think more clearly about it. — Paul Auster

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

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

Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place. — Paul Auster

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table. — 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. — Paul Auster

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

I'm really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that. — Paul Auster

I'm not a boy-writer, I've never been. I wanted to be a boy-writer when I was young, and I think that held me back. I wanted to be very clever, and funny, but I'm not very clever and not terribly funny. I've finally accepted my limits, and I do what I can do. — Paul Auster

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

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. — Paul Auster

You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked. — Paul Auster

When I am writing, even though it's hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I'm not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I'm not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic. — Paul Auster

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. — Paul Auster

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

it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom — Paul Auster

In my life, I've lived in very different kinds of places - very tiny rooms when I was young. And you do learn to cope with it. The funny thing is, as you begin to inhabit larger places, it's very interesting how quickly you adapt to your space. What seems enormous at first becomes natural after a few weeks. — 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. — Paul Auster

Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older! — 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. — Paul Auster

There is a line from the Marina Tsvetaeva poem I'm so fond of: "In this most Christian of worlds/ All poets are Jews." What she means is that writers and artists are outside the normal flow of daily life, the normal flow of society in general. — Paul Auster

Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was. — 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. — Paul Auster

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

but even the facts do not always tell the truth — Paul Auster

Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it. — Paul Auster

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling. — Paul Auster

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

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

What if I had been born during a war and I lived in an occupied city, and people were being taken out and shot every day? Everything would be different - even after the war ended, my future would be very different. Look at what these poor people in Aleppo are going through. The children, the ones who survive, are going to be absolutely altered by what they live through, and you and I, luckily, have never had to deal with that. — Paul Auster

It's a mind going over things, revisiting things, maybe trying to refine the original perception. You have to keep going a thing over in order to make sense off it. — Paul Auster

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

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

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

In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I've done it, each time I've done it I've felt deeply immersed in the material as I'm doing it, and then it's over and everything is the same. — Paul Auster

To tell you the truth, I'm not unhappy about it. I'm not even sure that I like the idea of adapting novels into films. It's very difficult to do, and it usually doesn't work. There are exceptions, but generally speaking, one feels disappointed with the result. — Paul Auster

I know that what's happened in the election has changed American reality, and I understand that I have to change with it. I have to rethink how I live my life. I'm not a political essayist; I don't see that I would have any value cranking out articles for newspapers or magazines, because lots of people are doing that already. — Paul Auster

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. — Paul Auster

He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said that he was glad to be alive. But at least he did not resent it. He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him - as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life. — Paul Auster

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

Writing is, after all, a gesture towards other people, giving something to others. And so it's not a completely hermetic exercise. It's really an opening up. — Paul Auster

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

All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself. — Paul Auster

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it. — Paul Auster

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. — Paul Auster

Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. — Paul Auster

How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesnt believe that, about other possibilities? — Paul Auster

Life Lessons by Paul Auster

1. Paul Auster's work emphasizes the importance of taking risks and embracing uncertainty in order to find meaning in life. He encourages readers to take chances and to not be afraid of failure, as it can lead to growth and success.
2. Auster also emphasizes the importance of understanding one's own identity and the power of storytelling in helping us make sense of our lives. He encourages readers to explore their own stories and to share them with others.
3. Lastly, Auster encourages readers to stay open-minded and to be willing to embrace change. He believes that life is full of surprises and that we must be willing to adapt and grow in order to make the most of it.