Quote

Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was.

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
Home
Bigger
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Buffalo
Even
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Never
Everyone
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Miles
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Ten
Together
York

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There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
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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.
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Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.
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It's always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there.
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There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.
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I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.
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Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.
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As Siri says, who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true.
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I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.
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We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
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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.
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All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
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I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
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All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.
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Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.
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Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.
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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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Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.
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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.
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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.
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