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I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
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Novelist
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Screenwriter
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University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
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More quotes by Paul Auster

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Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
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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.
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I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.
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Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.
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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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There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
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For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
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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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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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The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'
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The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can't describe how deeply I love them all.
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Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.
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I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.
Paul Auster
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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 think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
Paul Auster
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He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.
Paul Auster
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When I look back at experience [with my father], all I can do is feel pity. You know, how torn he was about how to act, what to say. And it seems an important story to me.
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Every man is the author of his own life.
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Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.
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The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect.
Paul Auster