Quotes from Paul Auster

Every time Sachs posed for a picture, he was forced to impersonate himself, to play the game of pretending to be who he was. After a while, it must have had an effect on him. (…) They say that a camera can rob a person of his soul. In this case, I believe it was just the opposite. With this camera, I believe that Sachs's soul was gradually given back to him.

If you do not consider the man before you to be human, there are few restraints of conscience on your behavior towards him.

Lo que realmente me asombra no es que todo esté derrumbado, sino la gran cantidad de cosas que todavía siguen en pie.

I want to talk about happiness and well being, about those rare, unexpected moments when the voice in your head goes silent and you feel at one with the world.

It's just another word for the same thing. You want to believe in some hidden purpose. You're trying to persuade yourself there's a reason for what happens in the world. I don't care what you call it--God or luck or harmony-- it all comes down to the same bullshit. It's a way of avoiding the facts, of refusing to look at how things really work.

The grinding search for money can crush the spirit out of you unless you're made of steel.

Todo lo inanimado se desintegraba, todo lo viviente moría. Cada vez que pensaba en esto notaba latidos en la cabeza al imaginar los furiosos y acelrados movimientos de las moléculas, las incesantes explosiones de la materia, el hirviente caos oculto bajo la superficie de todas las cosas.

I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water. The man in the black clothes taught me how to do it, and I'm not going to pretend I learned that trick overnight.

Les moments de crise produsent un redoublement de vie chez les hommes. Moments of crisis produce a redoubled vitality in men. Or, more succinctly perhaps: Men don't begin to live fully until thier backs are against the wall.

Peace on earth, good will toward men. Piss on earth, good will toward none.

At fifty-seven, I felt old. Now, at seventy-four, I feel much younger than I did then.

One of the odd things about being himself ... was that there seemed to be several of him, that he wasn't just one person but a collection of contradictory selves, and each time he was with a different person, he himself was different as well.

Doch am Ende sind Bücher kein Luxus, sondern eine Notwendigkeit, und Lesen ist eine Sucht, von der er keinesfalls geheilt werden möchte.

because he was a man who had suffered but because he was a man who had suffered and could still crack jokes.

Quand on me demande pourquoi je fume, je réponds que c'est parce que j'aime tousser.

It was the first time since his master's death that he had been able to think about such things without feeling crushed by sorrow, the first time he had understood that memory was a place, a real place that one could visit, and that to spend a few moments among the dead was not necessarily bad for you, that it could in fact be a source of great comfort and happiness.

Everything had changed for me, and words that I had never understood before suddenly began to make sense. This came as revelation, and when I finally had time to absorb it, I wondered how I had managed to live so long without learning this simple thing. I am not talking about desire so much as knowledge, the discovery that two people, through desire, can create a thing more powerful than either of them can create alone.

By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was.

You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget—and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self. So you put down the journal, and little by little, over the course of the next forty-seven years, almost everything was lost.

That was all he had ever aspired to, with a wife thrown into the bargain, maybe, and a kid or two to go along with her. It had never felt like too much to ask for, but after three years of struggling to write his dissertation, Tom finally understood that he didn't have it in him to finish. Or, if he did have it in him, he couldn't persuade himself to believe in the value of doing it anymore.

The whole scene had an imaginary quality to it. I knew that it was real, but at the same time it was better than reality, more nearly a projection of what I wanted from reality than anything I had experienced before.

It was too small a step, somehow, too puny a thing to settle for after having lost so much. So the courtship continued, and the more Tom came to despise his job, the more stubbornly he defended his own inertia; and the more inert he became, the more he despised himself.

All this belongs to the language of ghosts. There are many other possible kinds of talks in this language. Most of them begin when one person says to another: I wish. What they wish for might be anything at all, as long as it is something that cannot happen. I wish the sun would never set. I wish money would grow in my pockets. I wish the city would be like it was in the old days. You get the idea.

They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. Yes, says Blue to himself, that's what it feels like: like nothing at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough - to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others.