Paul Auster Quotes

My writing is really intuitive. As a kid, I went to school in New Jersey and hung out in New York, so the way kids used to talk got into our earlier songs.

We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V-2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house.

Brooklyn, when I was growing up, was awesome. It was stoopball and stickball - a lot of kids... the baby boom generation were all in the area. It was just a really great place.

I was born in a small suburb of Ilford in a rather nasty housing estate that my mother despised. She had grown up in the country, so when the war came and I was evacuated to Wales she thought I was much better off there.

I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria. I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing. I went to school, I hung out with my friends, I fought with my younger sisters. It was all very normal.

What self-respecting teenage kid growing up in the U.S. hasn't played Truth or Dare? Before cell phones, we kids spent a lot of time in the same place and actually had to come up with our own entertainment. Truth or Dare was the game of choice to break the ice between the boys and the girls.

I went to high school in New York City. So, I grew up in New Jersey my whole life, and I was watching all the people and all the kids that I met there become so jaded.

Music and motorcycles was my thing when I was a kid.

I grew up with interesting and funny people. We made our own fun. You had to use your imagination.

As a kid, picturing people who grew up in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I walking around in hose and latched shoes in the woods behind my house was an interesting atmospheric thing for me.

As a child, I used to 'torture' other kids by making them be in my shows. I would sell tickets to neighbors and organize performances.

I grew up in the suburbs, sometimes country-like suburbs because we moved around, but mostly suburbs.

I remember growing up in suburban New Jersey, and all the computer stores were like, 'Motherboard Mayhem' and all these cheesy names.

Growing up in New Jersey, teen clubs were your life. I'm not kidding! That was it. I was literally tied up five days a week with teen clubs; my parents would drop me off. Like, I didn't even drive.

It's mad to think I was just a kid from south London, rapping in parks with friends.

I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. I attended the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1978 to 1984.

I was born in 1935, so I was quite young when the war started. I remember we were in Bath, and it was 1942. We went down into the cellar of our house, and when we came up, I remember seeing all the glass on the floor where all the windows had been shaken out by the bombs.

I watched football, but I was a kid who really preferred being out on the street with my mates playing hide and seek!

Think of Europe in the 20th century. Two World Wars generated by nationalism. France, Germany, Britain fighting with each other.

All my life I've been aware of the Second World War humming in the background. I was born 10 years after it was finished, and without ever seeing it. It formed my generation and the world we lived in. I played Hurricanes and Spitfires in the playground, and war films still form the basis of all my moral philosophy. All the men I've ever got to my feet for or called sir had been in the war.

Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen seem to have no respect for the institutions that were created after World War II, and they see a potential alliance of populists around the world who would fight Islam and restore a certain semblance of traditional values.

In the account book of the Great War the page recording the Russian losses has been ripped out. The figures are unknown. Five millions, or eight? We ourselves know not. All we know is that, at times, fighting the Russians, we had to remove the piles of enemy bodies from before our trenches, so as to get a clear field of fire against new waves of assault.

I was born in the middle of the Second World War when the United States dropped their atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when millions of people were dying in concentration camps, when half the planet were colonies that belonged to empires. The word feminism didn't exist. And in my lifetime I have seen all these things improved, changed. We are more connected, more informed. We can fight against stuff together in ways we couldn't before.

I was raised and I was going to school in the suburbs of Paris. And so we, I didn't really go to the riots, to the barricade. I was too young, actually. Rather young.

People stopped calling themselves Freethinkers because it was so specifically German and anything German was terribly unpopular because of the two world wars. My family became Unitarians instead - it's the same sort of thing.