Top 50 Deborah Eisenberg Quotes
#1. It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.
Deborah Eisenberg
#2. I'm a very spoiled writer. I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I'm inefficient.
Deborah Eisenberg
#3. Just think! Garden, garden, garden, garden, garden, two happy people, and it could have gone on forever! They knew, they'd been told, but they ate it anyway, and from there on out, 'family!' Shame, fear, jobs, mortality, envy, murder ... "
"Well," William said brightly, "and sex.
Deborah Eisenberg
#5. It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise.
Deborah Eisenberg
#6. It's much easier to read the stories that have a lot of dialogue; of course, they flow much more easily into speech.
Deborah Eisenberg
#8. The task is not primarily to have a story, but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk, that give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure the essence. In other words, the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative.
Deborah Eisenberg
#9. I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.
Deborah Eisenberg
#10. The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay right behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen by.
Deborah Eisenberg
#11. 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.
Deborah Eisenberg
#12. I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.
Deborah Eisenberg
#13. I'm constantly trying to strip away layers of perceived thought or cliche.
Deborah Eisenberg
#14. I would say the reason that I've never written a novel is because I've never written a novel.
Deborah Eisenberg
#15. Art is inherently subversive. It's destabilizing. It undermines what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda.
Deborah Eisenberg
#16. 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.
Deborah Eisenberg
#17. I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. It's not something to be approached casually.
Deborah Eisenberg
#18. 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.
Deborah Eisenberg
#20. Nothing is more fortifying than learning that you have a real reader, a reader who truly responds both accurately and actively. It gives you courage, and you feel, I can crawl out on the branch a little further. It's going to hold.
Deborah Eisenberg
#21. 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.
Deborah Eisenberg
#22. It's almost uncanny to receive a prize named in honor of Bernard Malamud. I must have been in my early teens when 'The Magic Barrel' was published and I first read it.
Deborah Eisenberg
#23. I had no thought of being a writer. I never wanted to do anything. I'm tremendously lazy.
Deborah Eisenberg
#24. I actually came to New York because it was very tolerant. You know, it seems preposterous, ludicrous thing to say in an interview, but I came for the anonymity particularly.
Deborah Eisenberg
#25. I don't think things are ever exactly the way one expects, and I don't think things are ever the way one assumes they are at the moment. What I actually think is that one has no idea of what things are like, ever.
Deborah Eisenberg
#26. 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.
Deborah Eisenberg
#27. Every moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and ... the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line.
Deborah Eisenberg
#28. I suppose I'm always looking for a sort of acuity of perception either in my characters or about my characters.
Deborah Eisenberg
#29. 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.
Deborah Eisenberg
#30. One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.
Deborah Eisenberg
#31. The war in the East were hidden behind a thicket of language: patriotism, democracy, loyality, fredom - the words bounced around, changing purpose, as if they were made out of some funny plastic. What did they actually refer to? It seemed that they all might refer to money ...
Deborah Eisenberg
#32. Politics is a matter of human transaction. I consider absolutely everything political, because all fiction involves relationships between people, and relationships between people always include matters of power, of equity, of communication.
Deborah Eisenberg
#33. 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.
Deborah Eisenberg
#34. Time is as adhesive as love, and the more time you spend with someone the greater the likelihood of finding yourself with a permanent sort of thing to deal with that people casually refer to as 'friendship,' as if that were the end of the matter.
Deborah Eisenberg
#36. 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.
Deborah Eisenberg
#37. To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.
Deborah Eisenberg
#41. The first story I wrote was called 'Days,' and I have very little affection for it.
Deborah Eisenberg
#42. 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.
Deborah Eisenberg
#43. 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.
Deborah Eisenberg
#44. I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater.
Deborah Eisenberg
#45. When one writes, there's the double horror of discovering not only what it is that one so fears but also the triviality of that fear.
Deborah Eisenberg
#47. I'm not used to interviews. People don't generally interview waitresses.
Deborah Eisenberg
#48. 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.
Deborah Eisenberg
#49. Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.
Deborah Eisenberg
#50. For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.
Deborah Eisenberg
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