Paul Auster Quotes

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.

People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out

No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That's what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.

If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.

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.

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.

We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.

And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

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.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

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

We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

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.

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.