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Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
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Poet
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Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
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Paul Benjamin Auster
Tactile
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More quotes by Paul Auster

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I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.
Paul Auster
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The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be sympathetic and read each word carefully and understand what I'm writing about. I suppose every writer feels this.
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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.
Paul Auster
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As Siri says, who is deeply involved with neuroscience, emotion consolidates memory, and I think that's true.
Paul Auster
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Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.
Paul Auster
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I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
Paul Auster
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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
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As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
Paul Auster
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I'm really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.
Paul Auster
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In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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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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There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.
Paul Auster
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I can never say 'why' about anything I do. I suppose I can say 'how' and 'when' and 'what.' But 'why' is impenetrable to me.
Paul Auster
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
Paul Auster
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It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.
Paul Auster