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
Fiction creating reality.
I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.
I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.
No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.
The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.
When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.
He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.
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.
I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet - an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we think about them so much that we name a ship after them. The imaginary lives on in the real.
Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.
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.
Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.
There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.
Blue in the Face' is a romp. It's kind of a modern-day vaudeville.