728 Quotes by Paul Auster

I don’t know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t have to. But it is a compulsion. You don’t choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody.

The tone of every book is slightly different; there’s a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.

And even if there was an end, it seemed doubtful that I would ever know about it – which meant that the story would go on and on, secreting its poison inside me forever.

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.

When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn’t mean it’s not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas.

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry – actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

He was not trying to buy happiness, but simply an absence of unhappiness.

A good sense of humor, then, a taste for the ironies of life, and an appreciation of the absurd.

I’ve made my nothing, and now I’ve got to live in it.