728 Quotes by Paul Auster

I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I’m probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.

I’ve written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.

Come sono felice quando penso a tutti i libri che ancora non ho letto, centinaia, migliaia di libri. Quante cose belle mi aspettano!

It’s June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.

I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

I can’t remember everything we talked about, but the beginning of that conversation is a lot clearer to me than the end. By the time we came to the last half hour or forty-five minutes, there was so much bourbon in my system that I was actually seeing double. This had never happened to me before, and I had no idea how to bring the world back into focus.

No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood.

It was something like the word ‘it’ in the phrase ‘it is raining’ or ‘it is night’. What that ‘it’ referred to Quinn had never known.

I haven’t done any translating for decades now. It’s something I did when I was young.