728 Quotes by Paul Auster

I’m not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don’t even have a computer, I don’t have a cell phone.

I don’t want to use quotation marks anymore, I’ve gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn’t use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.

I think most writers can’t really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that’s probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.

You’re too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.

People pushed by force of habit, pushed for the pure pleasure of pushing, and they would go on pushing until you showed them you were willing to push back, at which point you would earn their respect.

I wasn’t able to think about them directly or summon them up in any conscious way, but as I put together their puzzles and played with their Lego pieces, building evermore complex and baroque structures, I felt that I was temporarily inhabiting them again – carrying on their little phantom lives for them by repeating the gestures they had made when they still had bodies.

There are two kinds of typical days. There’s the typical day when I’m writing a novel, and there’s the typical day when I’m not.

I’m an intelligent pessimist, a pessimist who has occasional flashes of optimism. Nearly everything happens for the worst, but not always, you see, nothing is ever always, but i’m always expecting the worst, and when the worst doesn’t happen, I get so excited I begin to sound like an optimist.

I think there might be some pressure released while I’m doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.