The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait. – Paul Auster
Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike. – Paul Auster
We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them. – Paul Auster
Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction. – 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. – Paul Auster
I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else. – Paul Auster
I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs. – Paul Auster
Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years. – Paul Auster
I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground. – Paul Auster
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. – Paul Auster
You have to protect it too, you can’t let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don’t believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either. – Paul Auster
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
The most challenging project I’ve ever done, I think, is every single thing I’ve ever tried to do. It’s never easy. – Paul Auster
When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound. – Paul Auster
You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one. – Paul Auster
I can never say ‘why’ about anything I do. I suppose I can say ‘how’ and ‘when’ and ‘what.’ But ‘why’ is impenetrable to me. – Paul Auster
I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it. – Paul Auster
When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go. – Paul Auster
The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‘Crime and Punishment’. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‘If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.’ – Paul Auster
I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much. – Paul Auster
I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are. – Paul Auster
I woke up one day and thought: ‘I want to write a book about the history of my body.’ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began. – Paul Auster
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. – Paul Auster