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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

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
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University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Lives
Death
Stays
Happens
Carry
Cannot
Along
Nothing
Control
Every
Ways
Something
Almost
Way
Dies

More quotes by Paul Auster

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I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.
Paul Auster
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Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.
Paul Auster
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I thought, Well, I'm writing about early childhood, so maybe it would make sense to write about late childhood as well, early adulthood. Those were my thoughts, and this was how this crazy book [Winter Journal] was composed. I've never seen a book with pictures like at the end, pictures related to things you've read before.
Paul Auster
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The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.
Paul Auster
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I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.
Paul Auster
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There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.
Paul Auster
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[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.
Paul Auster
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I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.
Paul Auster
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Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.
Paul Auster
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It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
Paul Auster
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To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster