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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
Book
Wasn
Mean
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Really
Days
Men
Alive
Translating
Anyone
Pretended
Someone
Translate
Persons
Spent
Person
Dead

More quotes by Paul Auster

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Every man is the author of his own life.
Paul Auster
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There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
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You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.
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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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Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
Paul Auster
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I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work.
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Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.
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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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I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.
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You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
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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.
Paul Auster
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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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If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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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When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
Paul Auster
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I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
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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.
Paul Auster
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Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.
Paul Auster
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Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.
Paul Auster