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Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
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Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
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University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
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Paul Benjamin Auster
Unique
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More quotes by Paul Auster

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Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was.
Paul Auster
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I know that what's happened in the election has changed American reality, and I understand that I have to change with it. I have to rethink how I live my life. I'm not a political essayist I don't see that I would have any value cranking out articles for newspapers or magazines, because lots of people are doing that already.
Paul Auster
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The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
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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I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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Every man is the author of his own life.
Paul Auster
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I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
Paul Auster
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I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.
Paul Auster
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Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.
Paul Auster
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Dismantling the architecture of my discontent
Paul Auster
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After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
Paul Auster
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I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.
Paul Auster
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I like the sound a typewriter makes.
Paul Auster
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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?
Paul Auster
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[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.
Paul Auster
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All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
Paul Auster
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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.
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