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I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Film Director
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster
Feel
Feels
Trembling
Writing
Solid
Kind
Ground
Never
Standing
Fear
Write
Certain

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My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.
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I see myself as anybody, as everybody I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
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In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.
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I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.
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Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
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I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don't even have a computer, I don't have a cell phone.
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Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was.
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I feel that the act of writing, in and of itself, is a tool towards probing that which you wouldn't without that pen in your hand. It's a strange, almost neurological phenomenon, and the words seem to generate more words - but only when you're writing. You can't do it in your head.
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After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
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We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
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I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.
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The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
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Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.
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In my life, I've lived in very different kinds of places - very tiny rooms when I was young. And you do learn to cope with it. The funny thing is, as you begin to inhabit larger places, it's very interesting how quickly you adapt to your space. What seems enormous at first becomes natural after a few weeks.
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We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
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Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.
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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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Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!
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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?
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I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
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