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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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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
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Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
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University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
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I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.
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[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.
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Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people - more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true - in certain rare, isolated cases.
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All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
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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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Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.
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I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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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.
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We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
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I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore.
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In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I've done it, each time I've done it I've felt deeply immersed in the material as I'm doing it, and then it's over and everything is the same.
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What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.
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You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
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What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That's always first.
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I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.
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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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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.
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For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.
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I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
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