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

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I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don't even have a computer, I don't have a cell phone.
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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.
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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 feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore.
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You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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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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Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.
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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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I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
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Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was.
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We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
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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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I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.
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I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
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Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.
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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.
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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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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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I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.
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