Paul Auster Quotes

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

In a story, you can turn to the front and begin again and everyone lives once more. That doesn't work in real life. And I love my real people the most.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

I like to write about things that don't reflect exactly on my life.

I like writing because you can make things happen and turn out the way they never do in real life.

When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.

It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

People don't like reality, they like crazy stories.

I feel that entertainment happens when fact and fiction is balanced.

My pictures are about getting as far away from reality as possible. Dreams should be part of our everyday life.

That's part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams, a demon elf feeding her spinning wheel with the reeds of the world so she might make her own weblike universe.

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.

I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

Bond was escapism, but not meant to be imitated in real life.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside.

Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.

When you go to the theater, you are slipping out of your life into someone else's imaginary world.

Storytelling, mythology and film provide a lot of hope but, on the flip side, can also create delusion.

There are reasons people seek escape in books, and one of those reasons is that the boundary of what can happen is beyond what we do - or would want to see in real life.