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We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
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Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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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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It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
Paul Auster
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Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?
Paul Auster
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I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.
Paul Auster
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I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
Paul Auster
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I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.
Paul Auster
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There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
Paul Auster
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He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
Paul Auster
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Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
Paul Auster
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It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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Dismantling the architecture of my discontent
Paul Auster
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I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.
Paul Auster