Paul Auster Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• 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

  Falling In Love, Confusion, Quality

  Paul Auster (2009). “Oracle Night: A Novel”, p.131, Henry Holt and Company

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• Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

  Paul Auster

  Struggle, Writing, Hands

  "I want to tell you a story" by Paul Auster, www.theguardian.com. November 4, 2006.

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• It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!

  Paul Auster

  Artist, Would Be, Done

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.

  Paul Auster

  Effort, Understanding, World

  Paul Auster, James M. Hutchisson (2013). “Conversations with Paul Auster”, p.14, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• When every card in the deck is stacked against you, the only way to win a hand is to break the rules. You beg, borrow, and steal, as the old adage goes, and if you happen to get caught in the act, at least you´ve gone down fighting the good fight.

  Paul Auster

  Fighting, Winning, Hands

  Paul Auster (2008). “The Book of Illusions”, p.30, Faber & Faber

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• 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

  Memories, Father, Moving

  Paul Auster (2007). “The Invention of Solitude”, p.102, Penguin

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• Things have not changed as much as we would like to think they have. Or maybe we're just in another one of the divided moments in the country. The late '60s certainly was one of them, the Civil War being another, but I'm hard-pressed to think of too many.

  Paul Auster

  Country, War, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.

  Paul Auster

  Science, Discovery, Weight

  Paul Auster (2014). “Collected Novels”, p.139, Faber & Faber

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• 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

  Heart, People, Broken

  Paul Auster (2016). “Collected Novels Volume Four”, p.148, Faber & Faber

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

  Paul Auster

  Emotional, Remember, Importance

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• 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

  Cities, Outsiders, Walks

  "An Interview with Paul Auster" by Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.

  Paul Auster

  Children, Book, Bridges

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• That's all I've ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn't matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

  Paul Auster

  Men, Hands, Soul

  Paul Auster (2008). “Collected Novels”

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• 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

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 6, 2008.

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• 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

  Honesty, People, Resentment

  Interview with Leonard Pierce, www.avclub.com. November 09, 2010.

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• I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

  Paul Auster

  Play, Translations

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 5, 2009.

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• 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

  Stupid, Believe, Protect

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• I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.

  Paul Auster

  Country, Believe, Opportunity

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 6, 2008.

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• 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

  Heart, Eye, Mirrors

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy, Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.

  Paul Auster

  Taken, Stories, Might

  Paul Auster (2008). “The New York Trilogy”, p.165, Faber & Faber

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• It's like a mathematical law, Grace.

  Paul Auster

  Science, Law, Grace

  Paul Auster (2008). “Oracle Night”, p.109, Faber & Faber

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• Money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.

  Paul Auster

  Lasts, Last Words, Courses

  Paul Auster (2011). “Collected Prose”, p.251, Faber & Faber

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• Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.

  Paul Auster

  Pieces, Literature, Dry

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• 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

  Reading, Men, Important

  "American dreams" by Hadley Freeman, www.theguardian.com. October 26, 2002.

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

  Paul Auster

  Important, Care, Obsession

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