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No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.
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Every man is the author of his own life.
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There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
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We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.
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Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.
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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.
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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.
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Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that's wonderful. But when people have built up a sort of resentment or animosity for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, they read in bad faith.
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I'm really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.
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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.
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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.
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Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.
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We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
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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.
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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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It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
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You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.
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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.
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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?
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Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
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