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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.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
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University Teacher
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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Paul Benjamin Auster
Mother
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Justify
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You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.
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I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
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[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.
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Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.
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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.
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The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
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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.
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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.
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Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.
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You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
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It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.
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I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can't tell you how lucky I feel, that I've managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I've been able to do what I want to do.
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It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me.
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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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.
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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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Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.
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The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'
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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.
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