728 Quotes by Paul Auster

As the book progresses, it takes on a more and more unstable character – filled with unpredictable associations and departures, marked by increasingly rapid shifts in tone – until you reach a point where you feel the whole thing being to levitate, to rise ponderously off the ground like some gigantic weather balloon. By the last chapter, you’ve traveled so high up into the air, you realize that you can’t come down again without falling, without being crushed.

These are the last things, she wrote. One by one they disappear and never come back. I can tell you of the ones I have seen, of the ones that are no more, but I doubt there will be time. It is all happening too fast now, and I cannot keep up.

There’s progress for you. A bigger and better mousetrap every month. Pretty soon, we’ll all be able to kill all the mice at the same time.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life – sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.

I was extremely shy. And I simply didn’t know how to go about it. It seemed a lot easier to write than to make films. All I needed was a pencil and a piece of paper, whereas filmmaking was something I had no access to.

Literature is essentially loneliness. It is written in solitude, it is read in solitude and, in spite of everything, the act of reading allows a communication between two human beings.

From poetry to justice, then. Poetic justice, if you will. For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.

Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn’t waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.