728 Quotes by Paul Auster

Anger and disappointment could take you just so far, he realized, but without curiosity you were lost.

Thoughts are real’, he said. ‘Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren’t aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that’s what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future’.

I’ve found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience – both physical and mental – and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I’m doing.

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.

I doubted that I would be able to sleep. There were too many things to digest, too many images churning in my mind, but the moment my head touched the pillow, I began to lose consciousness. I felt as if I’d been clubbed, as if my skull had been crushed by a stone. Some stories are too terrible, perhaps, and the only way to let them into you is to escape, to turn your back on them and steal off into the darkness.

Of all the interpretations I’ve considered over the years, this is the one I like best. That doesn’t mean it’s true, but as long as it could be true, it pleases me to think it is.

There’s a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog – and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! – in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.

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 do not repeat conversations that I can’t remember. And it’s something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.