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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

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I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.
Paul Auster
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Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
Paul 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.
Paul Auster
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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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We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.
Paul Auster
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Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
Paul Auster
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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
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As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.
Paul Auster
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Don't be a writer, it's a terrible way to live your life, there's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it.
Paul Auster
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Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.
Paul Auster
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
Paul Auster
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As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
Paul Auster
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But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
Paul Auster
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The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'
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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How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
Paul Auster
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It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster