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
[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.
I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.
The childhood scenes [ in The Tree of Life] are tremendous. My favorite moment is when the mother levitate - for three seconds. Of course, this is how a child thinks of his mother.
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 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.
All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.
There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.
Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
I think there might be some pressure released while I'm doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.
I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.