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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
Author
Autobiographer
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Film Director
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Poet
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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More quotes by Paul Auster

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We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
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I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.
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You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either.
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There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.
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In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.
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Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.
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I don't like talking about my work at all. I find it very difficult. I never know what to say. It's too close to me, and there's so many things happening unconsciously while I'm working that I'm not aware of, and people will point these things out to me, and I'll say, That's interesting. But I don't know what to make of it.
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Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.
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Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.
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Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.
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Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.
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I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.
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I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore.
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Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.
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If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics
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Every man is the author of his own life.
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It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
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Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.
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I haven't done any translating for decades now. It's something I did when I was young.
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Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.
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