Quotes from Paul Auster

I've always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil - especially for corrections.

The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

I can never say 'why' about anything I do. I suppose I can say 'how' and 'when' and 'what.' But 'why' is impenetrable to me.

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: 'Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe'

Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.

Money is the driving force of Hand to Mouth, the lack of money, and all those true stories about strange things in The Red Notebook, coincidences and unlikely events, surprise, the unexpected.

Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.

All the happiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.

There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.

I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.

Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.

You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, 'Of course they like it. They should like it.'

Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.