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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
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Men
Alive
Translating
Anyone
Pretended
Someone
Translate
Persons
Spent
Person
Dead
Book
Wasn
Mean
Knew
Really
Days

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I know that what's happened in the election has changed American reality, and I understand that I have to change with it. I have to rethink how I live my life. I'm not a political essayist I don't see that I would have any value cranking out articles for newspapers or magazines, because lots of people are doing that already.
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Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.
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It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.
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As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
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Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.
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Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.
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The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.
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Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it
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We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
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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.
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I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.
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When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word memoir on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, No, no, no, no, no, no. No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.
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It's always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there.
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Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.
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It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
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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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Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
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After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
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Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
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Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.
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