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

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I know the pleasure you get from making your films. The intense involvement in every aspect: the acting, the camera, the colors, the costumes, even the hair and makeup. Editing is thrilling. Everything to do with films is absorbing - everything but the money part, the business. But I'm deeply glad I've had that experience.
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Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
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Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.
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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.
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Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.
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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
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Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.
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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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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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I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese.
Paul Auster
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For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
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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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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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.
Paul Auster
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In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.
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
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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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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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The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.
Paul Auster
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Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
Paul Auster