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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

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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More quotes by Paul Auster

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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.
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Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!
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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.
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Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
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I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
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Every man is the author of his own life.
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When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
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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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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.
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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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I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.
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I think people are trying out ideas with the new technology and it's too early to say where it's going exactly. But again, whether it's digital or paper, it doesn't matter. It's words that somebody is reading and getting an experience out of that reading. That's all that really matters.
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The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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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.
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As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
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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.
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My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.
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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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In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.
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