Quote

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

Paul Auster

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Something
Almost
Way
Dies
Lives
Death
Stays
Happens
Carry
Cannot
Along
Nothing
Control
Every
Ways

More quotes by Paul Auster

Image
We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.
Paul Auster
Image
Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.
Paul Auster
Image
It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
Paul Auster
Image
How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
Paul Auster
Image
There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
Paul Auster
Image
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
Paul Auster
Image
I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
Paul Auster
Image
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
Image
Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.
Paul Auster
Image
I haven't done any translating for decades now. It's something I did when I was young.
Paul Auster
Image
I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.
Paul Auster
Image
No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself
Paul Auster
Image
Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.
Paul Auster
Image
Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.
Paul Auster
Image
The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can't describe how deeply I love them all.
Paul Auster
Image
I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.
Paul Auster
Image
As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
Paul Auster
Image
In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I've done it, each time I've done it I've felt deeply immersed in the material as I'm doing it, and then it's over and everything is the same.
Paul Auster
Image
You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either.
Paul Auster
Image
Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
Paul Auster