Paul Auster Quotes

It is difficult to divest one's self of vanity; because impossible to divest one's self of self-love.

This is myself, baby. All of my selves. I own each and every one of them. I know who I'm pretending to be and who I am." The look he gives me is withering. "Do you?

I don't feel I have an alter ego.

If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.

You're looking at a different me than I'm looking at.

I'm not proud to be me, I'm not excited to be me, but I find that I am me, and like most other individuals, I send out little signals; I tell everyone else how everything looks from where I am.

Nothing is stranger to man than his own image.

I don't even know what my voice is to this day.

A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others.

I've always been fascinated by this idea of who we are versus who we want to be.

I'm not what I make.

I don't even know who I am. All I know is that I am the sibling, daughter, sister, the friend of somebody, and I need to know who I am outside of that.

If you don't know yourself, you don't know your nature. If you don't know your nature, you don't know where to exist. By knowing your nature, knowing yourself, you know what to be and how to live. And that only comes from knowledge of self, knowing yourself.

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

What I do and who I am are two different things. And they always will be.

We are not always even what we are most.

Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me?

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.

Without possessions, success, fame; who are you?

But no man's a hero to himself. I've lived with me a lifetime. I know everything worth knowing about myself--" ~Something Wicked This Way Comes

It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth, but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been.