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Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a writer writes can excite the imagination and the feelings of the reader, then that reader carries it around forever. Nothing is more vivid than good fiction.

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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Newark
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Paul Benjamin
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Paul Benjamin Auster
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More quotes by Paul Auster

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I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
Paul Auster
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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.
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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.
Paul Auster
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We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
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I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.
Paul Auster
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You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
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What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That's always first.
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Fiction creating reality.
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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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Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
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Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
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For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.
Paul Auster
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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.
Paul Auster
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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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I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.
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Don't be a writer, it's a terrible way to live your life, there's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it.
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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.
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I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.
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I think all writers are a bit crazy Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.
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I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
Paul Auster