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I was extremely shy. And I simply didn't know how to go about it. It seemed a lot easier to write than to make films. All I needed was a pencil and a piece of paper, whereas filmmaking was something I had no access to.

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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Screenwriter
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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More quotes by 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.
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Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.
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Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
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Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!
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I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work.
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I know the pleasure you get from making your films. The intense involvement in every aspect: the acting, the camera, the colors, the costumes, even the hair and makeup. Editing is thrilling. Everything to do with films is absorbing - everything but the money part, the business. But I'm deeply glad I've had that experience.
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We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.
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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.
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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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Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.
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I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it's been a very split kind of response.
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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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I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.
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I think all writers are a bit crazy Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.
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Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’
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We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.
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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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No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.
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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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It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
Paul Auster