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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

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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Paul Benjamin Auster
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The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can't describe how deeply I love them all.
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Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it
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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.
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It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
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I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.
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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.
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Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
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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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We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.
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The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.
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The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.
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I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.
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He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.
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Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
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How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
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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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