728 Quotes by Paul Auster

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.

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

In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.

While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.

When I am writing, even though it's hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I'm not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I'm not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic.

What I'm trying to do in [Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.

People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.

You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.

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