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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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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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Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
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In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I've done it, each time I've done it I've felt deeply immersed in the material as I'm doing it, and then it's over and everything is the same.
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You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.
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Dismantling the architecture of my discontent
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The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
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As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
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As Siri says, who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true.
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The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
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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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In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.
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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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It's like a mathematical law, Grace.
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All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
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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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You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
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Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that's wonderful. But when people have built up a sort of resentment or animosity for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, they read in bad faith.
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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.
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The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
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I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.
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