Paul Auster Quotes

I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn't find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.

A book is the only real escape from this fallen world. Aside from death.

Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.

My bedroom is my sanctuary. It's like a refuge, and it's where I do a fair amount of designing - at least conceptually, if not literally.

One of the main uses of a home is to stay in it, when one is too weak and spiritless for conforming, without effort, to the ways of other houses.

Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.

I think for me, home needs to be a sanctuary. I need to feel like I've escaped the day when I get home.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

You could never hide yourself in these places - in Mies's Farnsworth house, for example. That was a mistake of Modernism. People need places to hide from each other, too. You need everything.

I just go in my back garden. It's the only place where people don't come and bother you.

It's going to seem idiotic to say this, but I think that at a given moment we all need a place to ourselves where we can refuge ourselves and cut ourselves off from the world.

Music should be your escape.

I think I'm always running away from somewhere, and to me, theatre's always felt like a good place to run away to.

To say that I loved school would be an understatement. It was my oasis, my sanctuary.

The music has a very strong escapist quality to it. In the moment where you feel like you need to escape, or when you are escaping, that's a good time to listen to 'When the Night.'

When I used to see things in the newspapers, going onto the pitch was the best way to get away from it.

Music was my solace, my refuge.

Africa is the one place on earth where Prince Harry can be truly himself. He describes Botswana as his 'second home,' but this magical country is even more than that - it is his haven, his safe harbour.

I would never crawl into a secret space to avoid the frustrating things.

Snooker is my sanctuary and always has been.

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.

The only refuge left to us was the poet's ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.

I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head.

It was actually books that started to make those pockets of freedom, which I hadn't otherwise experienced. I do see them as talismans, as sacred objects. I see them as something that will protect me, I suppose, that will save me from things that I feel are threatening. I still think that; it doesn't change. It doesn't change, having money, being successful. So from the very first, if I was hurt in some way, then I would take a book -- which was very difficult for me to buy when I was little -- and I would go up into the hills, and that is how I would assuage my hurt.