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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.

Paul Auster

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

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Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.
Paul Auster
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I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.
Paul Auster
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But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
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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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I think people are trying out ideas with the new technology and it's too early to say where it's going exactly. But again, whether it's digital or paper, it doesn't matter. It's words that somebody is reading and getting an experience out of that reading. That's all that really matters.
Paul Auster
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I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.
Paul Auster
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In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.
Paul Auster
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The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.
Paul Auster
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Often it's true that films just go right through us. You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.
Paul Auster
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The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.
Paul Auster
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
Paul Auster
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And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.
Paul Auster
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He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny. As he put it in his journal that night: If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of destroying it.
Paul Auster
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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?
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.
Paul Auster
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Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.
Paul Auster
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It's like a mathematical law, Grace.
Paul Auster
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If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics
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All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
Paul Auster