Paul Auster quotes - page 2

Paul Auster was an American author, director, and screenwriter, celebrated for his inventive narratives and postmodern style. His most famous works include "The New York Trilogy," which has captivated readers with its blend of mystery and philosophical reflection. He influenced contemporary literature with his explorations of identity, coincidence, and urban life. Here are 86 of his quotes:

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

Paul Auster

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.

Paul Auster

What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That's always first.

Paul Auster

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

Paul Auster

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Paul Auster

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

Paul Auster

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

Paul Auster

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Paul Auster

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.

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

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

Paul Auster

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

Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.

Paul Auster

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

Paul Auster

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

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

I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

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 kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

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

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

When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

Paul Auster