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We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

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
Force
Shaped
Coincidence
Continually
Forces

More quotes by Paul Auster

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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.
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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.
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The weird world rolls on... meaning that through all the ups and downs, all the travails that we go through, all the horrors, all the wars, all the deaths, all the cruelties, there's still something that keeps us wanting to wake up the next morning and go on with our lives - to make children, to fall in love, to continue humanity.
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In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I've done it, each time I've done it I've felt deeply immersed in the material as I'm doing it, and then it's over and everything is the same.
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You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
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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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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.
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As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.
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Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.
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I can never say 'why' about anything I do. I suppose I can say 'how' and 'when' and 'what.' But 'why' is impenetrable to me.
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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.
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It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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In my life, I've lived in very different kinds of places - very tiny rooms when I was young. And you do learn to cope with it. The funny thing is, as you begin to inhabit larger places, it's very interesting how quickly you adapt to your space. What seems enormous at first becomes natural after a few weeks.
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Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.
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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
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I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
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The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
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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.
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Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
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