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It's always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
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Film Director
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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Paul Benjamin Auster
Never
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Nothing
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Idea

More quotes by Paul Auster

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Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.
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There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
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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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I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.
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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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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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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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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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Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.
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If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics
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We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
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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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Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
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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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As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
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When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.
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It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.
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He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.
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I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don't even have a computer, I don't have a cell phone.
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