Paul Auster Quotes

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

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

I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese.

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.

Brooklyn has a bit of everything - some of the most beautiful things in America, and some of the most wretched, ugly, impoverished things.

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.

I'm saying you'll never know if you made the wrong choice or not. You would need to have all the facts before you knew, and the only way to get all the facts is to be in two places at the same time--which is impossible.

It was one of the most sublimely exhilarating moments of my life. I was half a step in front of the real, an inch or two beyond the confines of my body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt my skin had become transparent. I wasn't occupying space anymore so much as melting into it. What was around me was also inside me, and I had only to look into myself in order to see the world.

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.

Early in the summer of 1980, shortly after his son turned three, A. and the boy spent a week together in the country, in a house owned by friends who were off on vacation. A. noticed that Superman was playing in a local theater and decided to take the boy, on the off-chance that he would be able to sit through it. For the first half of the film, the boy was calm, working his way through a bin of popcorn, whispering his questions as A. had instructed him to do, and taking the business of exploding planets, rocket ships, and outer space without much fuss. But then something happened. Superman began to fly, and all at once the boy lost his composure. His mouth dropped open, he stood up in his seat, spilled his popcorn, pointed at the screen, and began to shout: Look! Look! He's flying!

Dismantling the architecture of my discontent

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

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.

Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.

He had understood that memory was a place, a real place that one could visit, and that to spend a few moments among the dead was not necessarily bad for you, that it could in fact be a source of great comfort and happiness.

He was there for you, and yet at the same time
he was inaccessible. You felt there was a secret core in him that could never be penetrated, a mysterious center of hiddenness. To imitate him was somehow to participate in that mystery, but it was also to understand that you could never really know him.

We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

One must die lovable (if one can). You are moved by this sentence, especially by the words in parentheses, which demonstrate a rare sensitivity of spirit, you feel, a hard-won understanding of how difficult it is to be lovable, especially for someone who is old, who is sinking into decrepitude and must be cared for by others. If one can. There is probably no greater human achievement than to be lovable at the end,

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.

When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.

She's too sad to be beautiful. No one that sad can still be beautiful.

Rather than punch the girl in the face, he abruptly stood up from his seat and walked away.

I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

Spartan surroundings, yes, but surroundings have never been of any importance as far as your work is concerned, since the only space you occupy when you write your books is the page in front of your nose,

You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget - and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self. So you put down the journal, and little by little, over the course of the next forty-seven years, almost everything was lost.

Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.

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.

Little by little, as you came to know her better in the weeks that followed, you discovered that eye to eye on nearly everything of any importance. Your politics were the same, most of the books you cared about were the same books, and you had familiar attitudes about what you wanted out of life: love, work, and children- with money and possessions far down on the list. Much to your relief, your personalities were nothing alike. She laughed more than you did, she was freer and more outgoing than you were, she was wormer than you were, and yet, all the way down at the bottom, at the nethermost point where you were joined together, you felt that you had met another version of yourself- but one that was more fully evolved than you were, better able to express what you kept bottled up inside you, a saner being. You adored her, and for the first time in your life, the person you adored adored you back. You came from entirely different worlds, a young Lutheran girl from Minnesota and a not so young Jew from New York, but just two and a half months after your chance encounter on February twenty-third thirty years ago, you decided to move in together. Until then, every decision you had made about women had been a wrong decision- but not this one.

Of all the interpretations I've considered over the years, this is the one I like best. That doesn't mean it's true, but as long as it could be true, it pleases me to think it is.

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.

a story about two friends who stop being friends because of a dispute in which both of their arguments are wrong

All this belongs to the language of ghosts. There are many other possible kinds of talks in this language. Most of them begin when one person says to another: I wish. What they wish for might be anything at all, as long as it is something that cannot happen. I wish the sun would never set. I wish money would grow in my pockets. I wish the city would be like it was in the old days. You get the idea.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

I was extremely shy. And I simply didn't know how to go about it. It seemed a lot easier to write than to make films. All I needed was a pencil and a piece of paper, whereas filmmaking was something I had no access to.

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

I want to talk about happiness and well being, about those rare, unexpected moments when the voice in your head goes silent and you feel at one with the world.

I thought I was terrible [to play a cameo] and decided never to act again.

When I look back at experience [with my father], all I can do is feel pity. You know, how torn he was about how to act, what to say. And it seems an important story to me.

I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.

In certain waya it was easy for others to take advantage of him. He refused to complain about anything.

After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.

Time moved in two directions because every step into the future carried a memory of the past

when a man's only assets are the brain in his head and the
tongue in his mouth, he has to think carefully before he decides
to open that mouth and speak.

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.

The world is so unpredictable.
Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly.
We want to feel we are in control of our own existence.
In some ways we are , in some ways we are not ...

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.

Without him, we are nothing, but the paradox is that we, the figments of another mind, will outlive the mind that made us, for once we are thrown into the world, we continue to exist forever, and our stories go on being told, even after we are dead.

In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.

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

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, there are words you will need to have. There are many of them. Many millions, I think. Perhaps only three or four. Excuse me. But I am doing well today. So much better than usual. If I can give you the words you need to have, it will be a great victory. Thank you. Thank you a million times over.

What at first had seemed to be no more than a small bump in the road was turned into a full-scale misfortune

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.

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

knowing now that the job of writing was as much about removing words as adding them,

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.

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.

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.

But gradually, as he tried to inhabit the room presented on the canvas (Van Gogh - The Bedroom), he began to experience it as a prison, an impossible space, an image, not so much of a place to live, but of the mind that has been forced to live there. Observe carefully. The bed blocks one door, a chair blocks the other door, the shutters are closed: you can't get in, and once you are in, you can't get out. Stifled among the furniture and everyday objects of the room, you begin to hear a cry of suffering in this painting, and once you hear it, it does not stop. 'I cried by reason of mine affliction...' But there is no answer to this cry. The man in this painting (and this is a self-portrait, no different from a picture of a man's face, with eyes, nose, lips, and jaw) has been alone too much, has struggled too much in the depthts of solitude. The world ends at that barricaded door. For the room is not a representation of solitude, it is the substance of solitude itself. And it is a thing so heavy, so unbreatheable, that it cannot be shown in any terms other than what it is.

I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It's coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don't even know where they are.

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.

It's just another word for the same thing. You want to believe in some hidden purpose. You're trying to persuade yourself there's a reason for what happens in the world. I don't care what you call it--God or luck or harmony-- it all comes down to the same bullshit. It's a way of avoiding the facts, of refusing to look at how things really work.

But fierce as my attraction was, I also knew that it was more than just a physical attraction [ ... ], more than just a momentenry surge of animal desire. I understood that she wasn't a terribly articulate person and nothing she said that afternoon was particularly brilliant or memorable. And yet there I was in a state of maximum torment - burning and longing and pining, a man trapped in the spines of love.

Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people - more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true - in certain rare, isolated cases.

Your wife tolerates your weaknesses and does not rant or scold, and if she worries, it is only because she wants you to live forever. You count the reasons why you have held her close to you for so many years, and surely this is one of them, one of the bright stars in the vast constellation of enduring love.

As long as we avoided the real subject, the spell could not be broken. We both slipped naturally into this kind of banter, and it became all the more powerful because neither of us abandoned the charade. We knew what we were doing, but at the same time we pretended not to.

"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.

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.

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

When a man walks into a room and you shake hands with him, you do not feel that you are shaking hands with him. Death changes that. This is the body of X, not this is X. The syntax is entirely different. Now we are talking about two things instead of one, implying that the man continues to exist, but only as an idea, a cluster of images and memories in the minds of the other people. As for the body, it is no more than flesh and bones, a heap of pure matter.

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.

You can survive only if nothing is necessary to you

Bit by bit, I found myself relaxing into the conversation. Kitty had a natural talent for drawing people out of themselves, and it was easy to fall in with her, to feel comfortable in her presence. As Uncle Victor had once told me long ago, a conversation is like having a catch with someone. A good partner tosses the ball directly into your glove, making it almost impossible for you to miss it; when he is on the receiving end, he catches everything sent his way, even the most errant and incompetent throws. That's what Kitty did. She kept lobbing the ball straight into the pocket of my glove, and when I threw the ball back to her, she hauled in everything that was even remotely in her area: jumping up to spear balls that soared above her head, diving nimbly to her left or right, charging in to make tumbling, shoestring catches. More than that, her skill was such that she always made me feel that I had made those bad throws on purpose, as if my only object had been to make the game more amusing. She made me seem better than I was, and that strengthened my confidence, which in turn helped to make my throws less difficult for her to handle. In other words, I started talking to her rather than to myself, and the pleasure of it was greater than anything I had experienced in a long time.

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.

When I met Maria at Sachs' apartment in 1979, she hadn't slept with a man in close to three years. It took her that long to recover from the shock of the beating, and abstinence was not a choice so much as a necessity, the only possible cure. As much as the physical humiliation she had suffered, the incident with Jerome had been a spiritual defeat. For the first time in her life, Maria had been chastened. She had stepped over the boundaries of herself, and the brutality of that experience had altered her sense of who she was. Until then, she had imagined herself capable of any thing: any adventure, any transgression, any dare. She had felt stronger than other people, immunized against the ravages and failures that afflict the rest of humanity. After the switch with Lilian, she learned how badly she had deceived herself. She was weak, she discovered, a person hemmed in by her own fears and inner constraints, as mortal and confused as anyone else.
It took her three years to repair the damage (to the extent that it was ever repaired), and when we crossed paths at Sachs's apartment that night, she was more or less ready to emerge from her shell.

His master was a man with the heart of a dog. He was a rambler, a rough-and-ready soldier of fortune, a one-of-a-kind two-leg who improvised the rules as he went along. They

The past, to repeat the words of Proust, is hidden in some material object. To wander about in the world, then, is also to wander about in ourselves.

We don't want to know when we will die or when the people we love will betray us....we're hungry to know the dead before they were dead, to acquaint ourselves with the dead as living beings.

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

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

We are all aliens to ourselves.

Anything was possible, and just because things happened in one way didn't mean they couldn' t happen in another.

Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get. Otherwise-and these were Willy's exact words-why bother to go on living?

I really have no interest in myself.

There is no escape from this. Either you do or you don't. And if
you do, you can't be sure of doing it the next time. And if you
don't, you never will again.

...feelings were always feelings, subjectively true one hundred percent of the time...

People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.

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.

The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.

The best thing about being fifteen is that you don't have to be fifteen for more than a year.

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.

We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. 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.

[Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer.

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

It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.

Even when I'm just sitting at my desk, I have to get up every twenty minutes or so and walk around, walk around, walk around, and then I can go back to the page. I can't just sit there for hours at a time. Language comes out of the body as much as the mind.

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 Everything-That-Was. One shrank, the other flailed. One toed the line, the other crossed it out. Much of the time they were at loggerheads, and because Willy found it so easy to shock his mother, he rarely wasted an opportunity to provoke an argument. If only she'd the wit to back off a little, he probably wouldn't have been so insistent about making his points. Her antagonism inspired him, pushed him into ever more extreme positions, and by the time he was ready to leave the house and go off to college, he had indelibly cast himself in his chosen role: as malcontent, as rebel, as outlaw poet prowling the gutters of a ruined world.