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All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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More quotes by Paul Auster

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Dismantling the architecture of my discontent
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I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
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You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
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Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.
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When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word memoir on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, No, no, no, no, no, no. No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.
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Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
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I feel that the act of writing, in and of itself, is a tool towards probing that which you wouldn't without that pen in your hand. It's a strange, almost neurological phenomenon, and the words seem to generate more words - but only when you're writing. You can't do it in your head.
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The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.
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How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesnt believe that, about other possibilities?
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It's like a mathematical law, Grace.
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There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
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When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
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I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese.
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Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?
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The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can't describe how deeply I love them all.
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I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.
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As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
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We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
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No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.
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For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
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