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But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
Paul Auster
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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
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Paul Benjamin
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Paul Benjamin Auster
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More quotes by Paul Auster
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
Paul Auster
Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a writer writes can excite the imagination and the feelings of the reader, then that reader carries it around forever. Nothing is more vivid than good fiction.
Paul Auster
As Siri says, who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true.
Paul Auster
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
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.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.
Paul Auster
I haven't done any translating for decades now. It's something I did when I was young.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
Paul Auster
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
As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
Paul Auster
We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.
Paul Auster
You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.
Paul Auster
If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
Paul Auster
It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.
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
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
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
In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I've done it, each time I've done it I've felt deeply immersed in the material as I'm doing it, and then it's over and everything is the same.
Paul Auster
