Paul Auster Quotes

• More often than not, our lives resemble the stuff of eighteenth-century novels.

  Paul Auster

  Topics in Uncategorized

• We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

  Paul Auster

  Topics in Uncategorized

• To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books – this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one’s life becomes very small.

  Paul Auster

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Books, Reading

• But even the facts do not always tell the truth.

  Paul Auster

  Topics in Truth

• 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

  Topics in Death

• The truth of the story lies in the details.

  Paul Auster

  Topics in Truth

• 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

  Topics in Job

  Tags in Difficult, Papers

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Wrong, Voice

• 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

  Topics in Children, Money

• 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

  Topics in America

  Tags in Leave, Poetry

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Time, Protect

• 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

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Film, Maybe

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Audience

• 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

  Topics in Money, Work

  Tags in Interest, Poetry

• 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

  Topics in Movies

  Tags in Worry

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Personalities

• Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

  Paul Auster

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Change

• If you’re not ready for everything, you’re not ready for anything.

  Paul Auster

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Ready

• There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.

  Paul Auster

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World, Hope

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

  Paul Auster

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Touch

Paul Auster (20)

Birth:	3rd February, 1947
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Poet

About

Auster grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and Newark and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, and novels of his own, as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

Related Authors

• Kristin Hannah
• Jodi Picoult
• Susanna Kearsley
• Mary Gaitskill
• Jeffrey Archer
• Ian McEwan
• Ruthie Knox
• Jessica Cutler
• Vikram Seth
• Elizabeth Janeway

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 2nd November

Births

• 1936 - Rose Bird
• 1865 - Warren G. Harding
• 1977 - Randy Harrison
• 1974 - Nelly
• 1877 - Aga Khan III

Deaths

• 1970 - Richard Cardinal Cushing
• 2000 - Robert Edmond Cormier
• 1975 - Pier Paolo Pasolini
• 1963 - Ngo Dinh Diem
• 2004 - Theo van Gogh