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Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
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Poet
Screenwriter
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University Teacher
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Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Must
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Forever
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Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.
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I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.
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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.
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The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
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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.
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I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it's been a very split kind of response.
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I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
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I see myself as anybody, as everybody I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
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How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesnt believe that, about other possibilities?
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I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
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Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.
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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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Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
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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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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.
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Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.
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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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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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We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
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I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
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