Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.
Paul Auster
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Time
Memory
Second
Memories
Space
Happens
Thing
More quotes by Paul Auster
It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.
Paul Auster
Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.
Paul Auster
The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
Paul Auster
Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.
Paul Auster
Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people - more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true - in certain rare, isolated cases.
Paul Auster
The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.
Paul Auster
I'm really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.
Paul Auster
There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
Paul Auster
I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.
Paul Auster
As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.
Paul Auster
You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
Paul Auster
The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.
Paul Auster
The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'
Paul Auster
This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly - with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe.
Paul Auster
If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.
Paul Auster
I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.
Paul Auster
The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.
Paul Auster
I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
Paul Auster