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
As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.
Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.
As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.
I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can't tell you how lucky I feel, that I've managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I've been able to do what I want to do.
Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.
At that point, Noriko finally breaks down and begins to cry sobbing into her hands as the floodgates open - this young woman who has suffered in silence for so long, this good woman who refuse to believe she's good, for only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves.
Blue in the Face' is a romp. It's kind of a modern-day vaudeville.
In my studio, it is unkempt and unattractive. Once I'm in my work, I don't notice where I am.
You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.
When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.
I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It's coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don't even know where they are.
I woke up one day and thought: 'I want to write a book about the history of my body.' I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
I don't know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn't hurt the book.