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Paul Auster Biography

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American writer and director whose writing blends absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, and the search for identity and personal meaning. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), and The Brooklyn Follies (2005). His books have been translated into more than forty languages.

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Paul Auster Quotes

If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.

Ready, Not Ready, Ifs, Everything

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.

Breathing, Goes On, Living, Reason, Stop, Writing

We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

Missed, Storm, Sunshine, Twilight

In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.

Connections, World, Way, Relationship, Sum

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.

Carry, Death, Dies, Happens, Way, Ways

Just the fact that Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by such a large number gives some validation to the impulse to stand firm. If we don't, I think within a year administration is pretty much going to dismantle American society as we've known it. I'm not sure that we're able to stop it from happening, but I don't think people should just roll over and passively watch it happen.

Administration, Firm, Giving, Impulse, People, Thinking

The best filmmakers, I think, have always had very narrow frameworks for their stories, and then they can go deeply, rather than skimming the surface.

Deeply, Filmmakers, Frameworks, Skimming, Stories, Thinking

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

Always Be Happy, Happy, Place, Seems

It's like a mathematical law, Grace.

Science, Law, Grace, Like, Mathematical

It's an ethical pact I've made with myself and with the reader - not to invent. And when I can't remember, I say I can't remember. I'm just appalled by the memoirs published by people who regurgitate dialogue, conversations from when they were small children, and they go on for three or four pages. I can't even remember what we said to each other ten minutes ago! How can I remember what was said sixty years ago? It's not possible.

Children, Ethical, Minutes, People, Said, Years

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

Book, Certain, Kind, Thinking, Time, Writing

I'm not a boy-writer, I've never been. I wanted to be a boy-writer when I was young, and I think that held me back. I wanted to be very clever, and funny, but I'm not very clever and not terribly funny. I've finally accepted my limits, and I do what I can do.

Accepted, Boys, Clever, Limits, Think, Thinking

You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either.

Believe, Happens, Protect, Same, Stupid

If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics

Beautiful, Cynics, Might, Turn, World

Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.

Example, Experience, Magazines, Mind, People, Reading

We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

Aliens, Eye, Eyes, Live, Sense, Who We Are

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

Compelling, Feels, Follow, Stories, Surge

Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely

Come, Degrees, Intractable, Make, Men, Solitude

Most of my friends' fathers had been in the war - either as soldiers or in some other capacity in the military. Whereas my father had not fought. He was older and he was in a business that was considered essential to the wartime effort - the wire business - and, of course, I was so young I didn't understand any of this.

Capacity, Course, Father, Military, Understand, War

No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That's what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.

Dark, Thinking, Missing, Down, Boils, Bad

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