Paul Auster quotes

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Human beings need stories, and we're looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it's television, whether it's comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

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.

There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.