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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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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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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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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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Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.
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Fiction creating reality.
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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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Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.
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I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.
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Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
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I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
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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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We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.
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It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.
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I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
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It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
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I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
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I see myself as anybody, as everybody I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
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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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After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
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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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