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No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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Paul Benjamin Auster
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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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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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I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
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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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I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
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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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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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The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
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We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
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I can never say 'why' about anything I do. I suppose I can say 'how' and 'when' and 'what.' But 'why' is impenetrable to me.
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
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If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
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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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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 like the sound a typewriter makes.
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Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.
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I thought, Well, I'm writing about early childhood, so maybe it would make sense to write about late childhood as well, early adulthood. Those were my thoughts, and this was how this crazy book [Winter Journal] was composed. I've never seen a book with pictures like at the end, pictures related to things you've read before.
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It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
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We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
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