Quotes by Paul Auster - Page 8

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.
Paul Auster / Author
Art
Beautiful
Struggle
Copy Quote
Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within...By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.
Paul Auster / Author
Eye
Thinking
Wandering Aimlessly
Copy Quote
Most of the boys would come with bits of equipment that their fathers had given them from their war days - helmets, canteens, binoculars, these kinds of things - that leant a kind of authenticity to the games we were playing. But, of course, my father never gave me anything. So I began to question him. You know, Why don't you have anything from the war? And I think he was...embarrassed to tell me he hadn't fought, because, you know, little boys want to turn their fathers into heroes, and he didn't want to be diminished in my eyes.
Paul Auster / Author
War
Father
Hero
Copy Quote
When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.
Paul Auster / Author
Father
Memories
Moving
Copy Quote
Memory and the imagination are almost identical. It's the same place in the brain and the same thing is happening. When you think about your own life, there are no memories without place. You are always situated somewhere. I think the imagination - the narrative imagination at least - situates you in a specific space when you start to think of a story. I often use places I know. I put my characters inside rooms and houses that I'm familiar with - sometimes the houses of my parents or grandparents or previous apartments I've lived in.
Paul Auster / Author
Character
Memories
Thinking
Copy Quote
For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail.
Paul Auster / Author
New York
Summer
Writing
Copy Quote
We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.
Paul Auster / Author
Men
Fate
Long
Copy Quote
I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation.
Paul Auster / Author
Character
Intelligent
Math
Copy Quote
Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely
Paul Auster / Author
Men
Matter
Solitude
Copy Quote

Related Author Authors

Zig Ziglar
Author
Saturday, Nov 06, 1926
Wednesday, Nov 28, 2012
Zz Packer
Author
Friday, Jan 12, 1973
Zsuzsanna Budapest
Author
Tuesday, Jan 30, 1940
Zona Gale
Author
Wednesday, Aug 26, 1874
Tuesday, Dec 27, 1938
Zoey Dean
Author
Zoe Weil
Author
Thursday, Jul 13, 1961
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Author
Wednesday, May 11, 1927
Wednesday, Oct 08, 2014
Zick Rubin
Author
Zhang Xianliang
Author

Saturday, Sep 27, 2014
Zelda Popkin
Author
Tuesday, Jul 05, 1898
Wednesday, May 25, 1983
Ze'ev Jabotinsky
Author
Monday, Oct 18, 1880
Sunday, Aug 04, 1940
Ze'ev Chafets
Author
Zane Grey
Author
Wednesday, Jan 31, 1872
Monday, Oct 23, 1939
Zane
Author
Zainab Salbi
Author
Wednesday, Sep 24, 1969

View All Author Quotes

Top Authors

Michael Jordan
Basketball Player
Sunday, Feb 17, 1963
Aldous Huxley
Writer
Thursday, Jul 26, 1894
Friday, Nov 22, 1963
Benjamin Franklin
Founding Father Of The United States
Sunday, Jan 17, 1706
Saturday, Apr 17, 1790
Carl Sagan
Astronomer
Friday, Nov 09, 1934
Friday, Dec 20, 1996
Soren Kierkegaard
Philosopher
Wednesday, May 05, 1813
Sunday, Nov 11, 1855
Will Rogers
Actor
Tuesday, Nov 04, 1879
Thursday, Aug 15, 1935
Epictetus
Philosopher
Vincent Van Gogh
Painter
Wednesday, Mar 30, 1853
Tuesday, Jul 29, 1890
Thomas Jefferson
3Rd US President
Saturday, Apr 13, 1743
Tuesday, Jul 04, 1826
Henry Ford
Industrialist
Thursday, Jul 30, 1863
Monday, Apr 07, 1947
H. L. Mencken
Journalist
Sunday, Sep 12, 1880
Sunday, Jan 29, 1956
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Philosopher
Dolly Parton
Singer-Songwriter
Saturday, Jan 19, 1946
Bob Marley
Singer
Tuesday, Feb 06, 1945
Monday, May 11, 1981
Mae West
Actress
Thursday, Aug 17, 1893
Saturday, Nov 22, 1980

View All Authors

Paul Auster Quotes - Page 8

App & Tools

Related Author Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

App & Tools

Related Author Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page