Deborah Eisenberg Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I suppose I'm always looking for a sort of acuity of perception either in my characters or about my characters.
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It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.
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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.
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I didn't want to write travelogues.
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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.
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One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.
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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.
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I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.
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I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.
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The first story I wrote was called 'Days,' and I have very little affection for it.
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I believe that people are what happened to their grandparents.
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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.
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To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.
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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.
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I would like to never ever think about any political issues.
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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.
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I just want to be on my own branch twittering.
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I'm not used to interviews. People don't generally interview waitresses.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.