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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.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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More quotes by Paul Auster

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I know the pleasure you get from making your films. The intense involvement in every aspect: the acting, the camera, the colors, the costumes, even the hair and makeup. Editing is thrilling. Everything to do with films is absorbing - everything but the money part, the business. But I'm deeply glad I've had that experience.
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As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
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Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.
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I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.
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Dismantling the architecture of my discontent
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And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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I know that what's happened in the election has changed American reality, and I understand that I have to change with it. I have to rethink how I live my life. I'm not a political essayist I don't see that I would have any value cranking out articles for newspapers or magazines, because lots of people are doing that already.
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I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.
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We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
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When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word memoir on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, No, no, no, no, no, no. No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.
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We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.
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The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.
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It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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