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Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

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
Tell
Happens
Someone
Stories
Able
Experiences
Way
Perhaps
Present
Happen

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I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.
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I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.
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You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
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Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
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The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.
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No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself
Paul Auster
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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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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either.
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Fiction creating reality.
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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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The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
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Guilt kept me going. It was impossible not to blame myself for what had happened, but even guilt was a comfort. It was a human feeling, a sign that I was still attached to the same world that other men lived in.
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The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
Paul Auster
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I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.
Paul Auster
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All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
Paul Auster
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I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can't tell you how lucky I feel, that I've managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I've been able to do what I want to do.
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.
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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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No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.
Paul Auster