Quote

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

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
Seems
Type
Able
Almost
Illegible
Might
Waiting
Crossing
Sometimes
Less
Crossings
Writing
Read
Paragraph
Trying
Words
Improve
Write
Changing
Next
Wait

More quotes by Paul Auster

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To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.
Paul Auster
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It's like a mathematical law, Grace.
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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
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Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
Paul Auster
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Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.
Paul Auster
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I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.
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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I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
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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The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'
Paul Auster
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Dismantling the architecture of my discontent
Paul Auster
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The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can't describe how deeply I love them all.
Paul Auster
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Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
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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He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.
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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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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When I look back at experience [with my father], all I can do is feel pity. You know, how torn he was about how to act, what to say. And it seems an important story to me.
Paul Auster
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Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.
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