Auster Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Auster Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
I say at the very end of "Winter Journal" that I do dream about my father often. I think I have a tremendous compassion for him, which has grown over the years. A certain kind of pity for him also in that he was so unrealised as a human being, so dogged, and so shut-off from people in many ways. You know, I've been writing another book, and it's another non-fiction autobiographical work, kind of a compliment to "Winter Journal", and it's just finished.— Paul Auster
[Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer.— Paul Auster
![Auster Sayings By Paul Auster: [Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/auster-sayings-by-paul-auster-159071.jpg "Auster Sayings By Paul Auster: [Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a")
Yes, she is in love with him, and yes, in spite of his qualms and inner hesitations, he loves her back, however improbable that might seem to him. Note here for the record that he is not someone with a special fixation on young girls. Until now, all the women in his life have been more or less his own age. Pilar therefore does not represent an embodiment of some ideal female type for him— Paul Auster
she is merely herself, a small piece of luck he stumbled across one afternoon in a public park, an exception to every rule.
Afterwards, walking to the car with my father, he told me I had played a nice game. No I hadn't, I said, it was terrible. Well, you did your best, he answered. You can't do well everytime.— Paul Auster
What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.— Paul Auster
Peace on earth, good will toward men. Piss on earth, good will toward none.— Paul Auster
The Adlers were diminishing. They had begun to look like one of those families in which no one got to be very old.— 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
![Auster Sayings By Paul Auster: [Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds ... a double, hyphenated American. I](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/auster-sayings-by-paul-auster-174945.jpg "Auster Sayings By Paul Auster: [Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds ... a double, hyphenated American. I")
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.— Paul Auster
Not to me," I said.— Paul Auster
Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The
Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby-
Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madame
Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without
Qualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about any
of that now?
No one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him. That— Paul Auster
And if he could survive— Paul Auster
the experience without completely losing heart, then perhaps
there was some hope for him after all.
By sticking with the
cab, he wasn't trying to make the best of a bad situation. He
was looking for a way to make things happen, and until he understood
what those things were, he wouldn't have the right to
release himself from his bondage.
You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.— Paul Auster
The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait.— 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
If it still shocks me to report what happened, that is because the real is always ahead of what we can imagine. No matter how wild we think our inventions might be, they can never match the unpredictability of what the real world continually spews forth. This lesson seems inescapable to me now. Anything can happen. And one way or another, it always does.— 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
Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.— Paul Auster
When I'm writing, I don't feel neurotic. So it's better for the family if I'm working.— Paul Auster
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.— Paul Auster
She's too sad to be beautiful. No one that sad can still be beautiful.— Paul Auster
But even the facts do not always tell the truth— Paul Auster
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
They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. Yes, says Blue to himself, that's what it feels like: like nothing at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough - to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others.— Paul Auster
To think one thought meant thinking the opposite thought, and no sooner did— Paul Auster
that second thought destroy the first thought than a third thought rose up to
destroy the second.
We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.— Paul Auster
I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me.— 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
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,— Paul Auster
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.— Paul Auster
Better to wait quietly in their corner, they think, than to be dashed— Paul Auster
against the stones.
Deep down, I don't believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us - every man, woman, and child - and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of ... the feat ... .You must learn to stop being yourself. That's where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That's how it's done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.— Paul Auster
Like so.
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.— Paul Auster
I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.— 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
If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics— Paul Auster
There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.— Paul Auster
![Auster Sayings By Paul Auster: There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/auster-sayings-by-paul-auster-6669.jpg "Auster Sayings By Paul Auster: There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.")
He learned how to look at himself from a distance, to see himself first of all as a man among other men, then as a collection of random particles of matter, and finally as a single speck of dust - and the farther he traveled from his point of origin, she said, the closer he came to achieving greatness.— Paul Auster
I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.— Paul Auster
It's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes— Paul Auster
all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom
I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.— Paul Auster
In the streets, everything is bodies and commotion, and like it or not, you cannot enter them without adhering to a rigid protocol of behavior. To walk among the crowd means never going faster than anyone else, never lagging behind your neighbor, never doing anything to disrupt the flow of human traffic. If you play by the rules of this game, people will tend to ignore you.— Paul Auster
Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.— Paul Auster
How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?— Paul Auster
Wherever he was, I was with him now. I had given him my word to say nothing, and the longer I kept his secret, the less I belonged to myself.— Paul Auster
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.— Paul Auster
Poets are everywhere now, but they talk only to each other— Paul Auster
One very big album, bound in expensive leather with a gold-stamped title on the cover - This is our life: The Austers - was totally blank inside.— Paul Auster
The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.— Paul Auster
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
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
Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that. I am ...— Paul Auster
Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.— Paul Auster
That work was what appealed to him most about their conversations.— Paul Auster
Tom liked having to think fast, and he found it invigorating
to push his mind in unaccustomed directions for a change,
to be forced to stay on his toes.
[...] one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success.— Paul Auster
![Auster Sayings By Paul Auster: [...] one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success.](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/auster-sayings-by-paul-auster-96586.jpg "Auster Sayings By Paul Auster: [...] one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success.")
Like a cross between Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions and Janice Lee's Damnation, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is at once smart and slyly unsettling. It is expert at creating a quietly building sense of dread while claiming to do something as straightforward as describe lost films - like those conversations you have in which you realize only too late that what you actually talking about and what you think you are talking about are not the same thing at all. With Rombes, Two Dollar Radio deftly demonstrates why it is rapidly becoming the go-to press for innovative fiction.— Brian Evenson
Once a man begins to recognize himself in another, he can no longer look on that person as a stranger.— Paul Auster
I met Peter Brook, the theater director, who's been based in Paris for many years at the Bouffes du Nord. I admire him tremendously. Some years ago, he was in New York, and he gave an interview with The Times, and what he said was this: "In my work, I try to capture the closeness of the everyday and the distance of myth. Because, without the closeness, you can't be moved, and without the distance, you can't be amazed." Isn't that extraordinary?— Paul Auster
A book is a mysterious object, I said, and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen.— Paul Auster
Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.— Paul Auster
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
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 accountants, pads for shopping lists, agendas for planning week. Everything in here important to life, and that make me happy, give honour to my life.'— Paul Auster
The man delivered his little speech with such solemnity, such a grave sense of purpose and commitment, I confess that I felt moved. What kind of stationery store owner was this, I wondered, who expounded to his customers on the metaphysics of paper, who saw himself as serving an essential role in the myriad affairs of humanity? There was something comical about it, I suppose, but as I listened to him talk, it didn't occur to me to laugh.
The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy.— 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
And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from troubling him, this state of being lost because a source of happiness, of exhilaration. He breathed it into his very bones. As if on the brink of some previously hidden knowledge, he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself, almost triumphantly: I am lost.— Paul Auster
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. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he has no intention of ever leaving it again.— 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
There is only this world and that numbing routines and brief squabbles and financial worries are an essential part of it, that in spite of the aches and boredomes and disappointments, living in this world is the closest we will ever come to seeing paradise.— Paul Auster
Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.— Paul Auster
The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself dissapear.— Paul Auster
Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.— Paul Auster
I don't have all the facts. And I might misremember. As a matter of fact, after I finished Winter Journal, I realized that I'd gotten someone's name wrong.— Paul Auster
I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.— Paul Auster
People pushed by force of habit, pushed for the pure pleasure of pushing, and they would go on pushing until you showed them you were willing to push back, at which point you would earn their respect.— Paul Auster
The whole scene had an imaginary quality to it. I knew that it was real, but at the same time it was better than reality, more nearly a projection of what I wanted from reality than anything I had experienced before.— Paul Auster
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.— Paul Auster
Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't— Paul Auster
waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.
The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.— 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
Speak now before it is too late, and then hope to go on speaking until there is nothing more to be said.— Paul Auster
Children are a consolation for everthing - except having children.— Paul Auster
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
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
Most people are participating in the grand adventure of living with one another.— Paul Auster
When you live in Brooklyn, if you throw a rock, you'll hit a writer - Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Paul Auster.— Libba Bray
When she was three, I sent her to day care for a couple— Paul Auster
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 ...
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
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
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
It's always a mystery to me, I have to confess. 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.— 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
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 fragmented that each time he sees a connection between two fragments he is tempted to look for a meaning in that connection. The connection exists. But to give it a meaning, to look beyond the bare fact of its existence, would be to build an imaginary world inside the real world, and he knows it would not stand. At his bravest moments, he embraces meaninglessness as the first principle, and then he understands that his obligation is to see what is in front of him (even though it is also inside him) and to say what he sees...— Paul Auster
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
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
In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that, in a funny way, when people are cooped up in rooms they are freer than when they are wandering about in the world.— Paul Auster
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
When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.— Paul Auster
I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.— Paul Auster
Some have held that there are only four winds: Solanus from the east; Auster from the south; Favonius from due west; Septentrio from the north. But more careful investigators tell us that there are eight.— Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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
