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.
—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
Topics: Storytelling
To leave the world a little better than you found it. That’s the best a man can ever do.
—Paul Auster
I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.
—Paul Auster
It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don’t know half as much as I think I do.
—Paul Auster
It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
—Paul Auster
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
Every man is the author of his own life.
—Paul Auster
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
If your only motive is to be loved, to ingratiate yourself with the crowd, you’re bound to fall into bad habits, and eventually the public will grow tired of you. You have to keep testing yourself, pushing yourself as hard as you can. You do it for yourself, but in the end it’s this struggle to do better that endears you to your fans.
—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
When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.
—Paul Auster
Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
—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
Topics: Books
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- John Updike American Author
- Lloyd Alexander American Writer
- Wendell Berry American Author, Environmentalist
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Richard Wright American Novelist, Short-Story Writer
- John Irving American Novelist
- John Barth American Novelist
- Raymond Chandler American Novelist
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