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Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

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
Going
Compelling
Nowhere
Lead
Follow
Inside
Stories
Feel
Surge
Feels
Unfold

More quotes by Paul Auster

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I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.
Paul Auster
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No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself
Paul Auster
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I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.
Paul Auster
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You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
Paul Auster
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I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
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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There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
Paul Auster
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Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.
Paul Auster
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We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
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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As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.
Paul Auster
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I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can't tell you how lucky I feel, that I've managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I've been able to do what I want to do.
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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Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
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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Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
Paul Auster
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As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.
Paul Auster
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We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
Paul Auster