Paul Auster Quotes

I can see a movie and believe the story and characterization and stay proud of it. It doesn't change. Even if it's unappreciated, that doesn't mean it can't be appreciated in the future.

I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.

What did you put in the fire?" Kaladin said. "To make that special smoke?" "Nothing. It was just and ordinary fire." "But, I saw-" "What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind." "What does the story mean, then?" "It means what you want it to mean," Hoid said. "The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think , but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.

You're alive, Bianca. You still can't appreciate what it means, to be alive. It's better than being a vampire - better than anything else in the world. I remember a little of waht being alive was like, and if I could touch that again, even for a day, it would be worth anything in the world. Even dying again, forever. All the centuries I've known and all the marvels I've seen don't compare to being alive." ~from Evernight, by

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don't mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren't any of those.

Ayame: This concludes my wonderful story. Kyo Sohma: You mean stupid!

Stories are the untested, uninvestigated theories that tell us what all these things mean. We don’t even realize that they’re just theories.

Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is “What do these stories mean?

What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible. That means that the writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true... and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you.

I never finished any of my early stories. They were all beginnings, an endless number of beginnings.

I've read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, ‘I worked really, really hard in my 20s.’ And I know what he means, because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can't do it forever, and you don't want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more.

Sometimes we make decisions about our life and they feel like the right decision at the time. No, they are the right decision at the time. But that doesn't mean they'll be the right decision forever.

Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.

The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.

I mean, sometimes we do do that, The National Anthem was a caustic satire and sometimes that's the way to go with the story rather than me being particularly misanthropic.

That Yes, I know what you mean-that is the technical definition of Best Friend Forever.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

My story, or my life or my legacy can hopefully show [fans] that once you’re down, that doesn’t mean you’re down forever. You never let up.

Just because you sing songs about a certain feeling doesn't mean you have to go feeling that way forever. You can sing about that for the rest of your life, but that doesn't mean things aren't going to change in your own life.

From the descent of the Holy Spirit at the beginning we may learn something concerning His operations at the present time. Remember at the outset that whatever the Holy Spirit was at the first, He is that now, for as God, He remains forever the same-whatever He did then He is able to do still, for His power is by no means diminished.