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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
Author
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Film Director
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Screenwriter
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University Teacher
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Newark
New Jersey
Paul Benjamin
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Paul Benjamin Auster
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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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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.
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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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Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.
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It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.
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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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I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.
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To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.
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I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.
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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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Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.
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I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.
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It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
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All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.
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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.
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When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
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Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.
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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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We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
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If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics
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