Quotes from Paul Auster

No importa lo que digan los demás; lo único importante es mantenerse en pie.

On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others.

Time moved in two directions because every step into the future carried a memory of the past

?? v?t, nh?ng v?t vô tri, có th? di?n ??t tình c?m c?a con ng??i.

For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins.

Is that what we mean by life? Let everything fall away, and then let's see what there is. Perhaps that is the most interesting question of all: to see what happens when there is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too.

The past, to repeat the words of Proust, is hidden in some material object. To wander about in the world, then, is also to wander about in ourselves.

a story about two friends who stop being friends because of a dispute in which both of their arguments are wrong

Half the people I know want to be writers. Why do you say want? If you're already doing it, then it's not about the future. It already exists in the present.

Kulland???m?z sözcüklere de?i?im dü?üncesini katmazsak çaresizli?imiz sürecek.

Yes, it is possible that we do not grow up, that even as we grow old, we remain the children we always were. We remember ourselves as we were then, and we feel ourselves to be the same. We made ourselves into what we are now then, and we remain what we were, in spite of the years. We do not change for ourselves. Time makes us grow old, but we do not change.

And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man.

La única constante en este mundo es la mierda, muchacho.

That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don't happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered.

Fuck Edison and his goddamned lightbulb.

knowing now that the job of writing was as much about removing words as adding them,

Only God can see the main road and the back road at the same time—which means that only God can know if you made the right choice or the wrong choice.

The great spectacle of human crookedness. It keeps coming at you from all sides, and whether you like it or not, it's the most interesting show in town.

Sonunda her hayat, nedeni belirsiz olgular?n toplam?ndan, rastlant?sal kesi?melerin, rastlant?lar?n, kendi amaçs?zl?klar?ndan ba?ka bir ?ey aç??a vurmayan geli?igüzel olaylar?n kayd?ndan ba?ka bir ?ey de?ildir.

For me, books were not the containers of words so much as the words themselves, and the value of a given book was determined by its spiritual quality rather than its physical condition.

?nsan bir kez kendine kar?? olmaya ba?lad? m?, ba?ka herkesin de kar?? oldu?unu dü?ünür.

A book is a mysterious object, I said, and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen.

as I write this now, I realize that even on that first day I had slipped through a hole in the earth, that I was falling into a place where I had never been before.