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Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
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Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Another
Writing
World
Panting
Novelist
Novelists
Choose
Nobody
Asks

More quotes by Paul Auster

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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.
Paul Auster
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The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
Paul Auster
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It's like a mathematical law, Grace.
Paul Auster
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You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either.
Paul 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.
Paul Auster
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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.
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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I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.
Paul Auster
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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
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I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don't even have a computer, I don't have a cell phone.
Paul Auster
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We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
Paul Auster
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I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.
Paul Auster
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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
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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.
Paul Auster
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I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.
Paul Auster
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Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.
Paul Auster
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Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.
Paul Auster
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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.
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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We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
Paul Auster