Top 22 Deborah Eisenberg Quotes

I believe that people are what happened to their grandparents.

I’m constantly trying to strip away layers of perceived thought or cliche.

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.

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.

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.

It’s a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.

I’ve never really thought of writing books. I’ve never thought about stories as a part of a collection.

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.

The first story I wrote was called ‘Days,’ and I have very little affection for it.

I always need huge amounts of time to do anything.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

It’s much easier to read the stories that have a lot of dialogue; of course, they flow much more easily into speech.

I’m not used to interviews. People don’t generally interview waitresses.