728 Quotes by Paul Auster

I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I’ve never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

But laugh laugh at me Men from around the world especially people from here For there are so many things I don’t dare tell you So many things you wouldn’t let me say Have pity on me.

If the world weren’t such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics.

When he talks about the world, then, he is referring to his world, to the small, circumscribed sphere of his own life, and not to the world-at-large, which is too large and too broken for him to have any effect on it.

You can’t hate something so violently unless a part of you also loves it.

Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I’m not thinking about my own life.

I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet – an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we think about them so much that we name a ship after them. The imaginary lives on in the real.