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Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
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Film Director
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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Paul Benjamin Auster
Nothing
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More quotes by Paul Auster

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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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The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'
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We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.
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Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!
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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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When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
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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.
Paul Auster
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Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
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No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.
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In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.
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How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
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It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.
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.
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The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
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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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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.
Paul Auster
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The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
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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.
Paul Auster