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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
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Cannot
Stories
Part
Dwell
Might
Chances
Much
Taken
Life
Chance
Story
Lost

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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.
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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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All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
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I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.
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Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was.
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Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.
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We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.
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Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.
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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.
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You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.
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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.
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I think all writers are a bit crazy Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.
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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.
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Fiction creating reality.
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In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.
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For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.
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The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.
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You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
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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.
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Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
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