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
book taken years
I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.
taken writing past
After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.
taken eye thinking
Even you, who’ve lived inside your body for 64 years, would apparently be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to think of your ear or one of your eyes or elbow, also familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.
taken stories might
But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
american-author book single syllable
The book is your book. You have been responsible for every single thing on every page, every comma, every syllable is your work.
accident bloom book felt walks
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.
chair dentist pair picked problem pulled sitting telephone time tooth wisdom
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.
absolutely book books human hungry intimate judge meet people stories strangers universe
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.
becomes convinced defines finding forming impossible mind project somehow spend start thinking title work
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.
census inventing job locked narrator sequence straight talks third took volume wound york
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.
absolutely altogether crisis late money ran run stopped until wrote
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.
future hoping living
I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.
again clean incredibly manuscript print screen tedious unless
With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.