Deborah Eisenberg Quotes & Sayings

It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

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

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

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

I suppose I'm always looking for a sort of acuity of perception either in my characters or about my characters. — Deborah Eisenberg

I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection. — Deborah Eisenberg

To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form. — Deborah Eisenberg

When I was a kid, I used to wonder (I bet everyone did) whether there was somebody somewhere on the earth, or even in the universe, or ever had been in all of time, who had had exactly the same experience that I was having at that moment, and I hoped so badly that there was. But I realized then that could never occur, because every moment is all the things that are going to happen, and every moment is just the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line. And I thought how maybe once there was, say, a princess who lost her mother's ring in a forest, and how in some other galaxy a strange creature might fall, screaming, on the shore of a red lake, and how right at that second there could be a man standing at a window overlooking a busy street, aiming a loaded revolver, but how it was just me, there, after Chris, staring at that turtle in the fourth-grade room and wondering if it would die before I stopped being able to see it. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

When you start writing, your incredulity at the childish, incompetent, graceless thing you've done is shattering. One of the advantages of having experience as a writer - and there aren't many, in face I can't think of any other - is that you know you can make the horrible thing better, then you can make it better again, then you can make it better again. And you may not be able to make it good, but at least it's not going to be what you're looking at now. — Deborah Eisenberg

I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. It's not something to be approached casually. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

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

I would like to never ever think about any political issues. — Deborah Eisenberg

You write something and there's no reality to it. You can't inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse. — Deborah Eisenberg

I'm a very spoiled writer. I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I'm inefficient. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

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

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

I'm not used to interviews. People don't generally interview waitresses. — Deborah Eisenberg

The first story I wrote was called 'Days,' and I have very little affection for it. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

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

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

When one contemplated Portia, when one contemplated Sharon, when one contemplated one's own apparently pointless, utterly trivial being, the questions hung all around one, as urgent as knives at the throat. But the instant one tried to grasp one of them and turn it to one's own purpose and pierce through the murk, it became blunt and useless as a piece of cardboard. — Deborah Eisenberg

Everything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

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

But the real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There's an incredibly inflexible set of instruments - our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it's awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it's so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

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

I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

I believe that people are what happened to their grandparents. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

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

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

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

I always need huge amounts of time to do anything. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

I didn't want to write travelogues. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

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

Her professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her assertions. — Deborah Eisenberg

I would say the reason that I've never written a novel is because I've never written a novel. — Deborah Eisenberg

I'm a bit of an expert on anger, having suffered from it all through my youth, when I was both brunt and font. It's certainly the most miserable state to be in but it's also tremendously gratifying, really - rage feels justified. And it's an excellent substitute for action. Why would you want to sacrifice rage to go about the long, difficult, dreary business of making something more tolerable? — Deborah Eisenberg

I'm a person with virtually no feelings. — Deborah Eisenberg

When I was in high school, all my friends said they were going to be writers. And I thought, How come you get to be a writer, and I don't? I thought WRITER was written on their foreheads and they saw it when they looked in the mirror, and I sure didn't see it when I looked in the mirror.
I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

Fiction is a report from the interior. — Deborah Eisenberg

I'm constantly trying to strip away layers of perceived thought or cliche. — Deborah Eisenberg

I just want to be on my own branch twittering. — 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. — Deborah Eisenberg

It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise. — Deborah Eisenberg

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

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

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people. — Deborah Eisenberg

I had no thought of being a writer. I never wanted to do anything. I'm tremendously lazy. — Deborah Eisenberg

Everything makes me angry, unless it makes me sad. — Deborah Eisenberg