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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.
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
I feel that the act of writing, in and of itself, is a tool towards probing that which you wouldn't without that pen in your hand. It's a strange, almost neurological phenomenon, and the words seem to generate more words - but only when you're writing. You can't do it in your head.
Paul Auster
Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.
Paul Auster
It's like a mathematical law, Grace.
Paul Auster
As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
Paul Auster
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
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
I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly the relationship between the man who finds the briefcase and the woman whose husband owned the briefcase. It's quite a beautiful passage.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.
Paul Auster
Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
Paul Auster
What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.
Paul Auster
How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
Paul Auster
What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That's always first.
Paul Auster
I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
Paul Auster
Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.
Paul Auster
We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.
Paul Auster