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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
#Lying #World #Novelists
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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.”
-- Paul Auster
#Character #Funny Things #Feels
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“There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.”
-- Paul Auster
#Reality #World
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“The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy.”
-- Paul Auster
#Thinking #Challenges #Done
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“Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.”
-- Paul Auster
#Beautiful #Reading #Choices
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“You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.”
-- Paul Auster
#Book #Stuff #Looks
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“I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.”
-- Paul Auster
#Powerful #Fall #Men
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“Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that's wonderful. But when people have built up a sort of resentment or animosity for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, they read in bad faith.”
-- Paul Auster
#Honesty #People #Resentment
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“Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.”
-- Paul Auster
#Stories #Able
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“I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.”
-- Paul Auster
#Thinking #Fiction #Narrative
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“One should never underestimate the power of books.”
-- Paul Auster
#Book #Underestimate #Should
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“All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.”
-- Paul Auster
#Believe #Character #Fiction
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“I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation....”
-- Paul Auster
#Character #Intelligent #Thinking
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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.”
-- Paul Auster
#Invisible #Not Sure
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“And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.”
-- Paul Auster
#Book #Writing #Humanity
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“While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.”
-- Paul Auster
#Reading #School #Writing
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“It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.”
-- Paul Auster
#Always Be Happy
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“Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.”
-- Paul Auster
#Historical #Needs #Stories
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“For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.”
-- Paul Auster
#Beautiful #Art #Struggle
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“I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.”
-- Paul Auster
#Important #Young
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“The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.”
-- Paul Auster
#Struggle #Stories
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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.”
-- Paul Auster
#Mean #Solitude #Live Your Life
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“I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.”
-- Paul Auster
#Science #Discovery #Weight
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“It's like a mathematical law, Grace.”
-- Paul Auster
#Science #Law #Grace
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“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.”
-- Paul Auster
#Dark #Thinking #Missing
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“We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.”
-- Paul Auster
#Fate #Men #Life And Death
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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
#Technology #Men #Cells
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“Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin....Writing as a lesser form of dance.”
-- Paul Auster
#Writing #Body #Sometimes
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“You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.”
-- Paul Auster
#Thinking #World #Way
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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.”
-- Paul Auster
#Men #Knowing #Self
