Paul Auster
Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Austeris an American author and director whose writing blends absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, The Book of Illusions, and The Brooklyn Follies. His books have been translated into more than forty languages...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 February 1947
CityNewark, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
I've learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.
I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
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.
I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.
I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.
I can never say 'why' about anything I do. I suppose I can say 'how' and 'when' and 'what.' But 'why' is impenetrable to me.
I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.
I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
I wanted to do something different. Therefore, the first person I thought would have been too exclusionary. It would have said me, me, me, me, me. I, I, I, I, I. As if I were pushing away my experiences from the experiences of others. Because basically what I was trying to do was show our commonality. I mean to say, in the very ordinariness of what I recount I think perhaps the reader will find resonances with his or her own life.
Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.
Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.