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 knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.
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.
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
I like the sound a typewriter makes.
Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.
When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word "memoir" on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.
Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.
Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.
There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
I'm in constant inner dialogue with my father still.
The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.
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.
It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me.
In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.