Quote

We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

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
Live
Aliens
Inside
Eyes
Eye
Sense
Others

More quotes by Paul Auster

Image
And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.
Paul Auster
Image
We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
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
No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.
Paul Auster
Image
Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that's wonderful. But when people have built up a sort of resentment or animosity for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, they read in bad faith.
Paul Auster
Image
Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.
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
We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
Paul Auster
Image
I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore.
Paul Auster
Image
I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can't tell you how lucky I feel, that I've managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I've been able to do what I want to do.
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
Don't be a writer, it's a terrible way to live your life, there's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it.
Paul Auster
Image
Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
Paul Auster
Image
As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.
Paul Auster
Image
Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
Paul Auster
Image
Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
Paul Auster
Image
Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!
Paul Auster
Image
I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
Paul Auster
Image
Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.
Paul Auster
Image
I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.
Paul Auster