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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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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
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Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Toughest
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Word
Play
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More quotes by 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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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
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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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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.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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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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Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.
Paul Auster
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I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!
Paul Auster
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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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Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.
Paul Auster
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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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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 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.
Paul Auster
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In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.
Paul Auster
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I see myself as anybody, as everybody I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
Paul Auster
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Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.
Paul Auster
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Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.
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