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The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
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Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
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Translating
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Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.
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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.
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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.
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I was extremely shy. And I simply didn't know how to go about it. It seemed a lot easier to write than to make films. All I needed was a pencil and a piece of paper, whereas filmmaking was something I had no access to.
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I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
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We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
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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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It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.
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For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
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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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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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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.
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I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.
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I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.
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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?
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Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.
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