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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.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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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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Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.
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Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.
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Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
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Dismantling the architecture of my discontent
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The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
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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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All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
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Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.
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You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.
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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.
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I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.
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The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
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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.
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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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The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.
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We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
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Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.
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Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’
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