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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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More quotes by Paul Auster
The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
Paul Auster
I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.
Paul Auster
All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
Paul Auster
How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesnt believe that, about other possibilities?
Paul Auster
The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
Paul Auster
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
Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
Paul Auster
Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
Paul Auster
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
Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.
Paul Auster
I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese.
Paul Auster
I like the sound a typewriter makes.
Paul Auster
And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.
Paul Auster
There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.
Paul Auster
We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.
Paul Auster
When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.
Paul Auster
Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
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
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
