Paul Auster Quotes

Although I don't examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I've come to acknowledge my Czechness more as I get older.

My father cared about the world he lived in, and so he admitted his confusion about his place in America because he didn't want me to make the same mistake in my life.

You don't become a fully-formed human as a female, or even a male, until you're at least 30.

The Jews are a race and not a religion. My goal was not to persecute the Jews but to enlighten Gentiles to put them on guard.

The most formative time of our lives are the years between birth and age 21, when we explore who we are and learn from those who surround us.

Every high school and college graduate in America should, I think, have some familiarity with statistics, economics and a foreign language such as Spanish. Religion may not be as indispensable, but the humanities should be a part of our repertory. They may not enrich our wallets, but they do enrich our lives. They civilize us. They provide context.

Do not let where you come from define you, but never forget the values you learned from your close community.

The best thing we can do is give students the tools for constructing their own identities - powerful new tools like African fractals - and then just get out of the way.

My national identity is first American. My religious identity is first Muslim.

A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.

Culture is the way for a country to know itself.

As a child, I didn't even realize I was Chinese. I was Singaporean, but my identity was wrapped up in the culture I was experiencing every day.

National identity is something that's directly connected to our personal experiences and the decisions we make, the roads we decide to take at certain points in our life.

My brother and I were brought up sort of thinking that we were English. I remember hearing the poet Roy Campbell on the radio and being quite shocked that he had a South African accent. I didn't know there were any South African poets.

I don't really know what feeling Japanese or Haitian or American is supposed to feel like. I just feel like me.

I don't think that Americans are ungrateful, not at all. But I do think that we are a young country, and we have a lot to learn.

We all have to consciously make efforts to identify our roots and nurture them.

Self-management and self-control are the keys to advanced knowledge, and both are difficult to learn without a sense of your own cultural identity.

To be getting an education means this: to be learning what is your own, and what is not your own.

America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions.

I do feel like once you know you are someone who is in the world and there are other countries and cultures, that stays with you and your decision-making forever.

I used to be Irish Catholic. Now I'm an American - you know, you grow.

We are undermining a generation's happiness by depriving them of national identity, religious identity, and gender identity

We must give Italians a sense of race.

One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion. One is not just a man.