Paul Auster Quotes

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.

The great thing about fiction is you can talk about things without being didactic about them, but hopefully forge a connection with people and an understanding about a shared humanity that tells its own story.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

Human beings have always been mythmakers.

We are the only animal that tells stories.

I'm constantly surprised by human nature and humanity. And I think that's why I love what I do: because I love to story-tell and bring new characters to life.

Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.

People just love stories.

As human beings, it's good to build stories.

THE MAGIC AND THE DANGER OF FICTION IS THIS: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

We need art. We've been telling stories since the beginning. As human beings, we need it for our survival.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

Art and music is part of what it means to be a human being. And if you're neglecting that, you're basically ignoring a huge side of the brain and a huge side of what it means to be human.

I'm a fan of great storytelling.