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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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The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
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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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I think all writers are a bit crazy Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.
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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.
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I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.
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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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It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
Paul Auster
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I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.
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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’
Paul Auster
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Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.
Paul Auster
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Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.
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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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All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
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.
Paul Auster
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Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
Paul Auster
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The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.
Paul Auster
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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.
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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Every man is the author of his own life.
Paul Auster
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Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.
Paul Auster