728 Quotes by Paul Auster

The rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction. I understand now that each fact is nullified by the next fact, that each thought engenders an equal and opposite thought. Impossible to say anything without reservation.

I don’t like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn’t work.

They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. Yes, says Blue to himself, that’s what it feels like: like nothing at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough – to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others.

Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can’t we?

I think if we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

In my later novels, I systematically used the convention, and then a moment came – when did it come? With The Book of Illusions, maybe – I thought, I don’t need them anymore, I don’t need them, I want to integrate the dialogue into the text.

An unreal world was much bigger than a real world, and there was more than enough room in it to be yourself and not yourself at the same time.

No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I’ve ever existed at all.