Paul Auster Quotes

You can't get a job without experience and you can't get experience until you have a job. Once you solve that problem you are home free.

And to get real work experience, you need a job, and most jobs will require you to have had either real work experience or a graduate degree.

People need to take as much interest in other sports as they take in cricket, and that's where we come across a vicious cycle of performance, sponsorship, recognition, jobs and TV visibility. It's a typical chicken-and-egg story; each one is directly related to the other without an answer for what comes first.

[Referring to the Democrats:] They can't get elected unless things get worse, and things won't get worse unless they get elected.

Life is full of cycles that have a way of perpetuating themselves. Success and failure both feed on themselves. Things can go downhill quickly, with people bogged down by ineffective behavior and poor teamwork, unless leaders intervene to shift the cycle.

Because I had worked the river boats some summers, pushing as far as New Orleans, I joined the Merchant Marine.

Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.

The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help. That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.

Once you've started to dig a hole, you can't get out of it.

Gaming is a vice the more dangerous as it is deceitful; and, contrary to every other species of luxury, flatters its votaries with the hopes of increasing their wealth; so that avarice itself is so far from securing us against its temptations that it often betrays the more thoughtless and giddy part of mankind into them.

We are caught in a trap, a cycle, in which we keep trying to solve the world's problems at every level - except the level at which the problems exist.

If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it. True. But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it. And that could be worse.

Work in some form or other is the appointed lot of all.

Mothers, tell your children: be quick, you must be strong. Life is full of wonder, love is never wrong. Remember how they taught you, how much of it was fear. Refuse to hand it down - the legacy stops here.

Life can be real tough... you can either learn from your problems, or keep repeating them over and over.

We know that they cannot bear their share of the taxes to help pay for their education. And unless those children get a good education we know that they become dropouts and they become delinquents and they become taxeaters instead of taxpayers. We know that they will join the unemployed. That is why we put top priority on breaking the vicious cycle that today threatens the future of 5 million children in this great land of opportunity which we talk about so much.

Preki quite literally only has the one foot

The break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath.

Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.

A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself by its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it-even if the person himself wants to stop it.

Hurt people hurt people. That's how pain patterns gets passed on, generation after generation after generation. Break the chain today. Meet anger with sympathy, contempt with compassion, cruelty with kindness. Greet grimaces with smiles. Forgive and forget about finding fault. Love is the weapon of the future.

If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.

PRIVATE, n. A military gentleman with a field-marshal's baton in his knapsack and an impediment in his hope.

The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story.

The junkie can never start to cure himself until he recognizes his true condition.