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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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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
Physical
Novel
Experience
Found
Absorbing
Keep
Novels
Order
Rhythm
Writing
Mental
Every
Focused

More quotes by Paul Auster

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The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
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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.
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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.
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But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
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How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
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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.
Paul Auster
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Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.
Paul Auster
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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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Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
Paul Auster
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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.
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Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was.
Paul Auster
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I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.
Paul Auster
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Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
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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You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
Paul Auster
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I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
Paul Auster
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The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be sympathetic and read each word carefully and understand what I'm writing about. I suppose every writer feels this.
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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