Top 30 Nathan Englander Quotes

Philip Roth has been a huge influence on me. The early books I read in my teens and twenties.

I feel very lucky that I have this career that allows me to say, ‘I’m ready to start now on this project,’ and I can go and do it.

I understand if everyone looking at me is seeing a Jew and seeing me as a kind of ‘other.’ But I can’t be expected to see myself that way. That is, to me, Jewish is the normal way to be; it’s not a type of being.

I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that’s it.

I don’t think it’s the writer’s job to give answers or to give opinions. In fact, when a writer has answers, I think the work ends up being corrupted. It becomes didactic. What a book does is share a consciousness and invite people to explore the questions as best as you can.

I’d say that in place of a singular phobic-level terror, I keep a whole collection of running, yet manageable, fears.

What I’m trying to say is that a lot that lies behind being able to live the writing life is psychological and wrapped up in ideas of self-definition.

Every book is vulnerable, and every book is nerve-wracking, but I’ve never been both so excited and terrified to have a book coming into the world. It’s an expressly loaded subject, one on which you can’t win.

As someone who spent a lot of years living in Jerusalem, one of the great perks is that when you come back, and you get into these Israel arguments in your American-Jewish clan, you can really just silence them by saying, ‘I lived there.’ So we used it like a bludgeon.

There was a summer in college where I worked for a stretch picking up garbage at the beach. On the early shift, it was very meditative walking the shoreline and crisscrossing the sand, picking up the junk people had dropped or tossed or that the ocean had returned. And there was this strange fantasy element to it.

Your brain forms a story and, if you’re lucky, there’s a line where the story takes over the brain. You don’t even know what you have.

The reason people get afraid of writing real, honest journalism and fiction, and the reason corrupted people and demagogues are afraid of journalism and fiction and poetry across the world, is because it is a subversive form.

Human experience is infinite. Lives are infinite. Stories are infinite. Just because one story has gravity in it doesn’t mean you can’t write a different one with gravity in it.

My mother raised me very clearly that if you cross the street, you will die. If you go outside, you will die. If you play sports, you will likely die. That’s what I was getting at home.

I’d chosen to dedicate my life to writing, and I asked myself, ‘if you write your whole life, and nobody ever sees a word, is it as a writer that you die?’

Twitter is the best art for writers. I find it enticing.

When I wrote my novel, ‘The Ministry of Special Cases,’ I couldn’t even brush my teeth. I had to write in isolation from everything else. I thought a play would take away from my fiction, but the more projects I work on, the more time I have.

With each book, I’ve found myself more and more able to draw off the personal and still be as vulnerable as I need to be as a writer.

When you’re in a world, and your parents are one way, and you’re told, ‘This is how the whole world is, and this is how you’re supposed to be,’ and you’re terribly unhappy in that world, it’s a very scary thing.

I’m very interested in how people change.

I moved to New York because I thrive there.

I am a fifth-generation American, but from a young age, I went to yeshiva. I spent 12 hours a day with rabbis, and I think in Yiddish. To this day, I have to go back and unravel my writing and polish it so everyone doesn’t sound like an old Jewish woman.

Empathy is what obsesses me. And watching empathy recede in the world is terrifying.

I’m just very interested, fascinated, heartbroken, obsessed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and our need to find peace on that front… Everyone’s always, like, victim and avenger at the same time.

I spent my whole childhood being told, ‘Israel is surrounded by enemies who are trying to push it into the sea.’ But can’t Gaza feel the same way? Personally, I’m frozen in time.

When you see ‘editor’ on a book, there are many permutations of what that title can mean.

I’m kind of in love with my theater agent. I’m a true naive about the theater, a total innocent.

I was resistant to the Internet. I was afraid of it.

There’s no such thing as being a cultural Jew. You’re religious or you’re not.

I didn’t sleep the night I finished ‘Sister Hills.’ It was so unsettling. I felt really wild. I didn’t have a clue. It’s a very loaded subject, and I did not know what I had. I was interested in watching how choices unfold over time. It’s a story that’s raising questions.