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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
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Film Director
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Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
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Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
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Paul Benjamin Auster
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There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
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When I look back at experience [with my father], all I can do is feel pity. You know, how torn he was about how to act, what to say. And it seems an important story to me.
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I don't like talking about my work at all. I find it very difficult. I never know what to say. It's too close to me, and there's so many things happening unconsciously while I'm working that I'm not aware of, and people will point these things out to me, and I'll say, That's interesting. But I don't know what to make of it.
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As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.
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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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If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics
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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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Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!
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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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Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
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I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.
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This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly - with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe.
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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 like the sound a typewriter makes.
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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 project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.
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As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
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I know the pleasure you get from making your films. The intense involvement in every aspect: the acting, the camera, the colors, the costumes, even the hair and makeup. Editing is thrilling. Everything to do with films is absorbing - everything but the money part, the business. But I'm deeply glad I've had that experience.
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The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
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