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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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It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
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We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
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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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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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I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.
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Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.
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We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
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The weird world rolls on... meaning that through all the ups and downs, all the travails that we go through, all the horrors, all the wars, all the deaths, all the cruelties, there's still something that keeps us wanting to wake up the next morning and go on with our lives - to make children, to fall in love, to continue humanity.
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The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
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Don't be a writer, it's a terrible way to live your life, there's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it.
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All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
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He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.
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All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.
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