Quote

He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny. As he put it in his journal that night: If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of destroying it.

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
Night
Save
Inch
Come
Destiny
Journal
Mean
Knew
Inches
Life
Fire
Fulfilling
Came
Touching
Within
Destroying
Moment
Closer
Sensed
Moments
Wings
Ignite

More quotes by Paul Auster

Image
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
Image
You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.
Paul Auster
Image
It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.
Paul Auster
Image
You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
Paul Auster
Image
I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
Paul Auster
Image
You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.
Paul Auster
Image
All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
Paul Auster
Image
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
Image
We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.
Paul Auster
Image
Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.
Paul Auster
Image
I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
Paul Auster
Image
All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.
Paul Auster
Image
I thought, Well, I'm writing about early childhood, so maybe it would make sense to write about late childhood as well, early adulthood. Those were my thoughts, and this was how this crazy book [Winter Journal] was composed. I've never seen a book with pictures like at the end, pictures related to things you've read before.
Paul Auster
Image
Fiction creating reality.
Paul Auster
Image
I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.
Paul Auster
Image
I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.
Paul Auster
Image
Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.
Paul Auster
Image
We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
Paul Auster
Image
Often it's true that films just go right through us. You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.
Paul Auster
Image
Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!
Paul Auster