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I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can't tell you how lucky I feel, that I've managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I've been able to do what I want to do.

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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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.
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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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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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Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.
Paul Auster
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The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.
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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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Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?
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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 had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.
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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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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.
Paul Auster
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I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.
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I think all writers are a bit crazy Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.
Paul Auster
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I don't like talking about my work at all. I find it very difficult. I never know what to say. It's too close to me, and there's so many things happening unconsciously while I'm working that I'm not aware of, and people will point these things out to me, and I'll say, That's interesting. But I don't know what to make of it.
Paul Auster
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You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
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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.
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Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
Paul Auster
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The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
Paul Auster