Quote

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

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Mean
Solitude
Really
Taste
Way
Poverty
Things
Writer
Life
Terrible
Obscurity
Means
Gained
Live
Burning
Nothing
Ahead

More quotes by Paul Auster

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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.
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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Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.
Paul Auster
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If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.
Paul Auster
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I know that what's happened in the election has changed American reality, and I understand that I have to change with it. I have to rethink how I live my life. I'm not a political essayist I don't see that I would have any value cranking out articles for newspapers or magazines, because lots of people are doing that already.
Paul Auster
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I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.
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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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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We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. 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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It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
Paul Auster
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We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.
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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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.
Paul 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.
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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You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.
Paul Auster
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Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.
Paul Auster
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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