{"author":"Paul Auster","author_id":"Paul+Auster","total_quotes":78,"quotes":[{"text":"For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.","author":"Paul Auster","tags":["art"],"id":97,"author_id":"Paul+Auster"},{"text":"All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.","author":"Paul Auster","tags":["auster","children","love","moon","palace"],"id":1419,"author_id":"Paul+Auster"},{"text":"As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.","author":"Paul Auster","tags":["philosophy"],"id":25562,"author_id":"Paul+Auster"},{"text":"This is what is called speaking. I believe that is the term. When words come out, fly into the air, live for a moment, and die. Strange, is it not? I myself have no opinion. No and no again. But still, there are words you will need to have. There are many of them. Many millions, I think. Perhaps only three or four. Excuse me. But I am doing well today. So much better than usual. If I can give you the words you need to have, it will be a great victory. Thank you. Thank you a million times over.","author":"Paul Auster","tags":["brilliant","clever","new-york-trilogy","witty","words"],"id":32300,"author_id":"Paul+Auster"},{"text":"Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance.","author":"Paul Auster","tags":["history","memory","past"],"id":33338,"author_id":"Paul+Auster"},{"text":"You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them into the right position, but not your face, never your face, and in the end - at least as far as others are concerned - your face is who you are, the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures of hands and feet. Even you, who have lived inside your body for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear, or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. All so 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.","author":"Paul Auster","tags":["identity","self-reflection"],"id":38819,"author_id":"Paul+Auster"},{"text":"I know you don't love me but that doesn't mean I'm the wrong girl for you.","author":"Paul Auster","tags":["inspirational-attitude","love"],"id":43672,"author_id":"Paul+Auster"},{"text":"For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.","author":"Paul Auster","tags":["integrity","me","shape "],"id":43696,"author_id":"Paul+Auster"},{"text":"Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get. Otherwise-and these were Willy's exact words-why bother to go on living?","author":"Paul Auster","tags":["meaning-of-life"],"id":44535,"author_id":"Paul+Auster"},{"text":"I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.","author":"Paul Auster","tags":["love"],"id":45694,"author_id":"Paul+Auster"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":78,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}