Paul Auster Quotes

Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I've never been down before is like going to a movie or something. Just wandering the city is entertainment.

I'm drawn to people who find themselves on the outside of things. I'm moved by that in real life.

Once I was in the city, I really enjoyed it. Just to experience things. There was so much new stuff.

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.

I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.

When I'm in the city, I like to go to different events and get introduced to different people. That's what New York is all about. There is great diversity, and there are people from all over the world who have done amazing things. That's my favorite thing to do: meet new people.

My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality.

I have a dirty little habit of distilling every city I've ever visited into the historical person I'd have most wanted to meet and share a cigarette with.

I like it when I go to a city and it puts its personality out there to be readily experienced.

Every year, I would spend weeks at a time in the hotels of distant cities.

When I fifteen or sixteen and was in London, moving from a small town and now going to a big city, I discovered so much new music. Finding all of that music and being inspired that much all at once, that was the benefit of being from a small place.

I see parallels between Karachi and the cities that I was familiar with: a very different place, but in terms of its human stories not really very different at all. That was what excited me about the place - that it was so complex, as difficult to me as an outsider and yet so human in a way that was ultimately very familiar.

But you ain't part of it, are you?" said Granny conversationally. "You try, but you always find yourself watchin' yourself watchin' people, eh? Never quite believin' anything? Thinkin' the wrong thoughts?

Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.

I spent a lot of time standing on street corners [of New York City] talking to local residents. I spent time in bookstores and galleries. But most of the time, I really did not have much to do.

The trouble with me is that I'm an outsider. And that's a very hard thing to be in American life.

I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers.

To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I'd never seen anything like them. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be one of them or simply live among them taking notes and photographs.

You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

Thus I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species.

I walked around Soho's street for over an hour, running into familiar faces but never once stopping to chat. It was then that I felt something discomforting and comforting all at once. I didn't want to be here, in this city, anymore.

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.

Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.