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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.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
Author
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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.
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I'm really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.
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The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be sympathetic and read each word carefully and understand what I'm writing about. I suppose every writer feels this.
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
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We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.
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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.
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Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.
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I think all writers are a bit crazy Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.
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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.
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Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.
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Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.
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For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
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It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
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Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.
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The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
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I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
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Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
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The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.
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