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
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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.
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I don't have all the facts. And I might misremember. As a matter of fact, after I finished Winter Journal, I realized that I'd gotten someone's name wrong.
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If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics
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I think there might be some pressure released while I'm doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.
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But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
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Often it's true that films just go right through us. 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.
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The book is your book. You have been responsible for every single thing on every page, every comma, every syllable is your work.
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It's no accident that he should've felt that way because I very consciously was writing a book about the 20th century. In fact, all during the writing of the book I had a subtitle in mind, not that I was going to use it but it was kind of a working tool, which was "Anna Bloom Walks Through The 20th Century.
blue
Blue in the Face' is a romp. It's kind of a modern-day vaudeville.
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Anyway, right around that time I had a problem with a wisdom tooth and I had to go to the dentist to have the thing pulled out, and it was while I was sitting in the chair in the dentist's office, the dentist had picked up this big pair of pliers and was just about to yank out my tooth when the telephone rang.
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I don't judge these things by numbers. How many people read 'Paradise Lost' when it was published? Two hundred? Three? As long as there's one reader, the book is doing what a book does. Books are irreplaceable, because they're the only place in the universe where two strangers can meet on absolutely intimate terms. We need to tell stories as human beings. People are as hungry for that as they have ever been.
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I find it impossible to start a project without the title in mind. I can sometimes spend years thinking of the title to go with the thing that's forming in my head. A title defines the project somehow and if you keep finding the ramifications of the title in the work it becomes better, I'm convinced of this.
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I took a job with the U.S. Census Bureau. In The Locked Room, the third volume of the New York Trilogy, there's a sequence where the narrator talks about working for the census, and I took this straight from life. As in the book, I wound up inventing people. Kind of curious.
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In the mid-70s I wrote some plays, also, but it wasn't until the very late '70s when I ran into a real crisis on every level, personal, artistic, and I was absolutely broke, I'd run out of money and... hope, I guess, and I stopped writing altogether for awhile.