Deborah Eisenberg

“Writing does change you, and of course it feels good to do things, so you could say writing is de facto therapeutic. But really, one writes to write.”

“Of course I want to have a deliciously seductive story on the surface which will keep people engaged and amused, but primarily, I'm interested in other things. It's the texture of any given moment that fascinates me: what is really going on between people or in somebody's mind.”

“I would say the reason that I've never written a novel is because I've never written a novel.”

“The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicised so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy.”

“I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.”

“It's certainly possible to write fiction that isn't trivial and isn't what people would call political, but it is very hard to figure out how, because our ordinary lives have such a strong tincture now of the whole world.”

“I'm a very spoiled writer. I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I'm inefficient.”

“I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.”

“I had no thought of being a writer. I never wanted to do anything. I'm tremendously lazy.”

“I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.”

“I find I often just fall into a stone-like sleep, right in the middle of the day, just sort of clonk. I can't work for extended periods when I'm beginning something. But if I'm at the end of something, I can work on for hours and hours and hours.”

“For someone whose goal in life was to stay unemployed, I can't imagine what I thought was going to happen. I was so terrified of everything, I just thought I'd curl up in the gutter and die, and by a complete mistake, my life turned out to be absolutely wonderful.”

“I happen to be a 64-year-old woman who lives in Manhattan, so on and so forth, but am I the sum total of my sort of bodily coordinates? Well, of course not.”

“I always need huge amounts of time to do anything.”

“I suppose I'm always looking for a sort of acuity of perception either in my characters or about my characters.”

“It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.”

“I didn't want to write travelogues.”

“The world belongs to no one. There are very few people who fit into the world. And part of the struggle of every human life is to somehow claim a place on the planet, but it's at the forefront of the experience of the wandering race. The wandering people.”

“We're all walking around trying to deal with a certain amount of shame, to repress it. And we restrict our mental lives to smaller and smaller areas.”

“One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.”