728 Quotes by Paul Auster

I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We’ve kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don’t need. I’m anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that’s it.

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.

Dismantling the architecture of my discontent.

I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It’s not natural to make art.

Something was wrong, and while Mr. Bones could scarcely imagine what that thing was, Henry’s sadness was beginning to have an effect on him, and within a matter of minutes he had taken on the boy’s sadness as his own. Such is the was with dogs.

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.

If you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behavior towards him.

I never feel I’m standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.

If it still shocks me to report what happened, that is because the real is always ahead of what we can imagine. No matter how wild we think our inventions might be, they can never match the unpredictability of what the real world continually spews forth. This lesson seems inescapable to me now. Anything can happen. And one way or another, it always does.