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I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
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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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Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
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Dismantling the architecture of my discontent
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I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
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In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.
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I know that what's happened in the election has changed American reality, and I understand that I have to change with it. I have to rethink how I live my life. I'm not a political essayist I don't see that I would have any value cranking out articles for newspapers or magazines, because lots of people are doing that already.
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Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.
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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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You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.
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I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.
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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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The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
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I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese.
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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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How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
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I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
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You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.
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I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.
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I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.
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I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
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