Paul Auster Quotes

I'm nobody, who are you?

In order to find yourself, who you really are, you got to be with yourself; you got to hang out with yourself.

Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with you - MYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am.

I sometimes feel that I am trying to dig in the world around me. I'm involved in another kind of archaeology to look for another kind of truth, and the moment I find, the moment I am separated from that life, the moment I am sort of in a world, every time I have gone out and performed in the, in the cinema for example, if you do two or three films on the trot you suddenly have this impression that you're becoming separate or separated from the world around you.

What is there? I know first of all that I am. But who am I? All I know of myself is that I suffer. And if I suffer it is because at the origin of myself there is mutilation, separation. I am separated. What I am separated from -- I cannot name it. But I am separated.

My skin was the border between the world and me.

Each character represented a trait that resides in me.

My personality doesn't interest me.

I think Zippy is part of me, but I'm not Zippy.

Let me know myself; let others guess at me.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

I don't know what other people are doing - I just know about me.

I'm not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I'd rather be figured out.

When even the most strictly logical mind looks round and investigates the phenomena attending its own existence, perhaps the first fact to attract attention by its strongly marked prominence is the remarkable loneliness of man. He stands alone.

He who integrates is lost.

I don't know what other people are like, I haven't been able to crawl inside anybody else.

I relate to most of the characters I play, because I do feel like an outsider.

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

I don't think we spend enough time in reflection and introspection. We don't know who we are as individuals in this culture anymore.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

I can't tell you what your purpose is, that's got to come from you.

I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.