Quote

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Started
Wrong
Ringing
Times
Telephone
Voice
Telephones
Night
Asking
Number
Three
Dead
Ends
Numbers
Someone

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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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Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.
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Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
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Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.
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In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.
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I like the sound a typewriter makes.
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The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.
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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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I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
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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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Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
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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.
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Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.
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Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it
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Don't be a writer, it's a terrible way to live your life, there's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it.
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The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
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Every man is the author of his own life.
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How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
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As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
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I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.
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