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

More quotes by Paul Auster

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I think all writers are a bit crazy Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.
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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.
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Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
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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.
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As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
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Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
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I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore.
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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.
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Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’
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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.
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This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly - with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe.
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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I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it's been a very split kind of response.
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There is a double rhythm in all human beings. We are binary beings - two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Two legs for walking. And the heartbeat thumping in our chest mirrors that.
Paul Auster
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How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
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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Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
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.
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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.
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.
Paul Auster