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
In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.
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.
I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work.
I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.
I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.
This is very rare for anyone in life to pursue something and that thing being the thing you actually most want to do. It's all about the inner, rather than the outer. Whether people like or don't like my work, read it or don't read it, it's just been a gift from the gods that I've been able to sit at my desk for the last almost 50 years and do the things I've wanted to do.
The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.
All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
Brooklyn has a bit of everything - some of the most beautiful things in America, and some of the most wretched, ugly, impoverished things.
The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy.
No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.