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I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
Paul Auster
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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
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Film Director
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Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
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More quotes by Paul Auster
The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.
Paul Auster
Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.
Paul Auster
It's like a mathematical law, Grace.
Paul Auster
Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.
Paul Auster
We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.
Paul Auster
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
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
Guilt kept me going. It was impossible not to blame myself for what had happened, but even guilt was a comfort. It was a human feeling, a sign that I was still attached to the same world that other men lived in.
Paul Auster
The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work.
Paul Auster
Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
Paul Auster
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
All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
Paul Auster
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
I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.
Paul Auster
Often it's true that films just go right through us. You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.
Paul Auster