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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.
Paul Auster
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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
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Paul Benjamin
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Paul Benjamin Auster
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More quotes by Paul Auster
I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
Paul Auster
I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
Paul Auster
We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.
Paul Auster
I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.
Paul Auster
It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
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
Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
Paul Auster
Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.
Paul Auster
The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
Paul Auster
Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people - more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true - in certain rare, isolated cases.
Paul Auster
My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.
Paul Auster
It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.
Paul Auster
Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.
Paul Auster
I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself
Paul Auster
Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.
Paul Auster
I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.
Paul Auster
I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
Paul Auster