Paul Auster Quotes

For myself, I do not now know in any concrete human terms wherein my individuality consists. In my present human form of consciousness I simply cannot tell.

If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.

Who am I, really? I prefer to leave that up to the observer, because I will never finish answering that.

I don't really know what my personality is anyway. I don't really have one.

I don't even know what my voice is to this day.

There's nothing harder than defining oneself.

There are a lot of people who don't know me and what I am all about.

I couldn't put into a capsule one thing that represents me, I don't think.

What is your identity, and how do you know who you are if you don't have language?

I don't even know who I am. All I know is that I am the sibling, daughter, sister, the friend of somebody, and I need to know who I am outside of that.

People seem to know more about me than I do.

I always have a hard time describing myself.

To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.

We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.

I stare at the mirror as I try to remember who I am and who I am not.

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

...fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like. Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me? (140)

It's important to be self-aware about what people are saying about you, but even more so, be very aware of who you actually are, and to have that be the main priority.

When you try to talk about yourself, you dont know who you are, or what your like, or what your like to other people. And the moment you do it's a formula for yourself, and then you're imitating yourself, and then nobody likes you and they dont know why.

Ours has been called a culture of narcissism. The label is apt but can be misleading. It reads colloquially as selfishness and self-absorption. But these images do not capture the anxiety behind our search for mirrors. We are insecure in our understanding of ourselves, and this insecurity breeds a new preoccupation with the question of who we are. We search for ways to see ourselves. The computer is a new mirror, the first psychological machine. Beyond its nature as an analytical engine lies its second nature as an evocative object.

I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

Even you, who’ve lived inside your body for 64 years, would apparently be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to think of your ear or one of your eyes or elbow, also familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

I've been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It's boring.