It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

— Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes

A meal was no more than a fragile defense against the inevitability of the next meal. Food itself could never answer the question of food; it only delayed the moment when the question would have to be asked in earnest.

— Paul Auster

Asking forgiveness from someone is a complicated affair, a delicate balancing act between stiff-necked pride and tearful remorse, and unless you can truly open up to the other person, every apology sounds hollow and false.

— Paul Auster

A dream, a wild dream of removing ourselves from the cares and sorrows of this miserable world and creating a world of our own. A long shot, yes, but who’s to say it can’t happen?

— Paul Auster

One must never own up to a fart in public. That is the unwritten law, the single most stringent protocol of American etiquette. Farts come from no one and nowhere; they are anonymous emanations that belong to the group as a whole, and even when every person in the room can point to the culprit, the only sane course of action is denial.

— Paul Auster

Silence is not a rewarding response, no matter what it means.

— Paul Auster

These are treacherous times, and I know how easily perceptions can be twisted by a single word spoken into the wrong ear. Impugn a man’s character, and everything that man does is made to seem underhanded, suspect, fraught with double motives.

— Paul Auster

More often than not, what stirs the imagination is best kept in the imagination, and Gwyn is aware of that, she is wise enough to know that the distance between thought and deed can be enormous, a gulf as large as the world itself.

— Paul Auster

Entrances do not become exits, and there is nothing to guarantee that the door you walked through a moment ago will still be there when you turn around to look for it again.

— Paul Auster

The book was a work of fiction. Even though it was based on facts, it could tell nothing but lies. I signed the contract, and afterwards I felt like a man who had signed away his soul.

— Paul Auster

From poetry to justice, then. Poetic justice, if you will. For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.

— Paul Auster

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

— Paul Auster

What he does not know is that were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change, and little by little he would come to a full understanding of his situation – that is to say, of Black, of White, of the case, of everything that concerns him.

— Paul Auster

Una mentira nunca puede deshacerse. Ni siquiera la verdad es suficiente.

— Paul Auster

Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night... Lying is a bad thing. It makes you sorry you were ever born. And not to have been born is a curse. You are condemned to live outside time. And when you live outside time, there is no day and night. You don’t get a chance to die.

— Paul Auster

The place is New York, the time is the present, and neither one will ever change.

— Paul Auster

La vida nos arrastra de muchas maneras que no podemos controlar y casi nada permanece con nosotros.

— Paul Auster

The impediment to the building of Babel – that man must fill the earth – would be eliminated. At that moment it would again be possible for the whole earth to be of one language and one speech. And if that were to happen, paradise could not be far behind.

— Paul Auster

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.

— Paul Auster

He read many books, he looked at paintings, he went to the movies. In the summer he watched baseball on television in the winter he went to the opera. More than anything else, however, what he liked to do was walk. Nearly every day, rain or shine, hot or cold, he would leave his apartment to walk through the city – never really going anywhere, but simply going wherever his legs happened to take him.

— Paul Auster

How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?

— Paul Auster
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