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It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
Paul Auster
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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
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Film Director
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Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Artist
Nothing
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Everyone
More quotes by Paul Auster
I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
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.'
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
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
The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.
Paul Auster
I don't like talking about my work at all. I find it very difficult. I never know what to say. It's too close to me, and there's so many things happening unconsciously while I'm working that I'm not aware of, and people will point these things out to me, and I'll say, That's interesting. But I don't know what to make of it.
Paul Auster
How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesnt believe that, about other possibilities?
Paul Auster
I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly the relationship between the man who finds the briefcase and the woman whose husband owned the briefcase. It's quite a beautiful passage.
Paul Auster
The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
Paul Auster
Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.
Paul Auster
Every man is the author of his own life.
Paul Auster
You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
Paul Auster
Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
Paul Auster
