|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Other authors named Paul:
|
|
|
|
Author's popularity: 3
Vote:  
|
If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
|
|
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Actually Brooklyn has a long literary history, and we shouldn't forget it, Walt Whitman being the most important. Quite a few of the great 20th century poets, the Objectivists, lived in Brooklyn, Louis Zukovsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and probably one of the great 20th century poems, The Bridge, written by Hart Crane, was composed in Brooklyn. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | I had been writing before that, very much wanted to do this with my life, I'd already decided. But those years when I was a student were crazy times in America. We're talking about the late '60s and Columbia University, where I was a student, was a particular hotbed of activity, and I was swept up in a lot of it and compelled by a lot of it, I found it irresistable. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me. |
Popularity: 8
Vote: | 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." |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | It's true, I did work for about six months on an Esso oil tanker. I got the job after I left college. I didn't know what I wanted to do in life. I didn't want to be an academic, which is probably what I was best suited for, but I just didn't want to be in school anymore, and the idea of spending my life in a university was just awesomely terrible. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | The book is your book. You have been responsible for every single thing on every page, every comma, every syllable is your work. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The funny thing is, as a young person I was trying to write prose, and I wrote a lot of it, but I was never satisfied with the results. Two of the novels I wound up finishing and publishing later I started very early on, in my early 20's, In The Country Of Last Things and Moon Palace. Both of those books I worked a great deal on but never quite got a grip on either one. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one. |
|
Biography
|
Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author. He is married to fellow writer Siri Hustvedt.
Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to France. Since returning to America in 1974, he has published his own poems, essays, novels and translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.
His first novel was a detective novel called Squeeze Play and was written under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin (Benjamin is his middle name).
Auster gained renown for a series of three experimental detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy (1987). These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, creating his own, distinctively postmodern form in the process. The search for identity and personal meaning has been a red thread between all of Auster's later publications.
Later Auster works concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (The Book Of Illusions, Leviathan). Through his rich and unexpectedly dream-like prose, Paul Auster is widely regarded by critics as one of America's greatest living writers.
Paul Auster is widely described as a modern day story-teller.
B.R. Myers attacked Auster in "A Reader's Manifesto."
Published works Fiction
*The New York Trilogy (1987) (including City of Glass, 1985; Ghosts, 1986 and The Locked Room, 1986)
*In The Country of Last Things (1987)
*Moon Palace (1989)
*The Music of Chance (1990)
*Leviathan (1992)
*Mr Vertigo (1994)
*Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1992)
*Timbuktu (1999)
*The Book of Illusions (2002)
*Oracle Night (2003)
Poetry
*Ground Work (1990)
*''
Film
*The Music of Chance
*Smoke (1995)
*Blue in the Face
*Lulu On The Bridge
Biography
*The Art of Hunger (1982)
*The Red Notebook
*The Invention of Solitude (1982)
*Hand To Mouth (1997)
Misc
*The Story of My Typewriter'' (2002)
Edited collection
"True Tales of American Life" (2001)
...(more on Wikipedia)
|
|
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Paul Auster".
|
|
|