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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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Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people - more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true - in certain rare, isolated cases.
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All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.
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Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.
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There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
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Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!
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The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
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I see myself as anybody, as everybody I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
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Dismantling the architecture of my discontent
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Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.
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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.'
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In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.
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The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect.
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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.
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I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.
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In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I've done it, each time I've done it I've felt deeply immersed in the material as I'm doing it, and then it's over and everything is the same.
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It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
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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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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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[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.
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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