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I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.

Paul Auster

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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
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Paul Benjamin
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More quotes by Paul Auster

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Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.
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Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.
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I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.
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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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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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It's always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there.
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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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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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Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
Paul Auster
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How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
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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.
Paul Auster
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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
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As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.
Paul Auster
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I think people are trying out ideas with the new technology and it's too early to say where it's going exactly. But again, whether it's digital or paper, it doesn't matter. It's words that somebody is reading and getting an experience out of that reading. That's all that really matters.
Paul Auster
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Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.
Paul Auster
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I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can't tell you how lucky I feel, that I've managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I've been able to do what I want to do.
Paul Auster
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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.
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Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.
Paul Auster