Paul Auster Quotes

I define myself from a vision, from a point of view of life.

I've come to believe that whoever I am didn't start on December 14, 1946, and isn't going to end on whatever that mysterious date is in the future.

I'm not interested in nostalgia; I'm interested in who I am.

You have to know who you are, if you don't you have nightmares.

I think understanding your life as a story is a really terrific way of kind of knowing where you are and knowing who you are.

A lot of people thought the sense of self was hard-wired, but it's not at all. It can be changed very quickly, and that's very intriguing.

I'm always trying to figure out what my taste is, what my likes and dislikes are.

I have always felt that I am the sum total of my parts.

If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.

How you go about moving within the world you live in says so much about who you are.

Everything I have experienced in my life helps form who I am today, and I would not change or forget any of it.

I developed a sense of self before moving to crazy Hollywood, which was really important.

You don't realize how much a part of your character is part of yourself until you are no longer playing that character.

Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is more flexible and more open to unexpected turns.

I've kept a journal since I was 15. And I feel like it's been crucial to who I've become and trying to maintain stuff, a sense of who I am just for myself and not for other people.

There's nothing harder than defining oneself.

I think everyone self-mythologizes.

I know for myself, and maybe I'm weird or whatever, but the whole thing is about constantly redefining identity.

Our deep desires define us, really.

Our lives teach us who we are.

You have to look yourself in the eye and ask, 'Who are you?' It can't be all about work.

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

Every one of us at some point in our lives has had the struggle with identity.

My whole life has been a search for finding myself, pretty much.

A lot of time when you're out injured is spent with internal reflection and kind of looking at yourself in the mirror and deciding who you want to be and where you fit in.