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I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
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Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Story
Write
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I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
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You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.
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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.
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Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.
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It's like a mathematical law, Grace.
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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.
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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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Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.
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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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As Siri says, who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true.
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When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word memoir on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, No, no, no, no, no, no. No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.
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I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.
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I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.
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Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
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The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
Paul Auster
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What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.
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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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We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
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As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.
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We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
Paul Auster