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I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
Paul Auster
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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
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More quotes by Paul Auster
Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
Paul Auster
Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.
Paul Auster
I don't read reviews any more, but I'm told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it's been a very split kind of response.
Paul Auster
We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
Paul Auster
Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.
Paul Auster
The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
Paul Auster
Fiction creating reality.
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
The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can't describe how deeply I love them all.
Paul Auster
It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.
Paul Auster
The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.
Paul Auster
We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.
Paul Auster
Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.
Paul Auster
I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.
Paul Auster
This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly - with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe.
Paul Auster
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.
Paul Auster
