Quotes from Nathan Englander

Palestine isn't a state when it concerns statehood. When it comes to warring, it's a state, yes? The Palestinians, they live in a country, for the purpose of war.

I'm very interested in how people change.

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.

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.

I always call myself either an optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist - I'm not sure which way it goes.

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

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?'

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.

I lived in Jerusalem with the Temple Mount as my holy site. My Palestinian neighbors lived in Al-Quds with the Haram al-Sharif.

There's no safety in anything, but in the arts, there is really this idea of no promises. I didn't follow the writing dream for safety.

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.

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

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.

When I was living in Jerusalem, I used to write in a coffee shop called Tmol Shilshom. I'd sit at the same table every day and work. And right next to my seat was a weathered wingback chair by a window.

Yes, there is a way I was taught to think that's very suited to writing. And, of course, I'm thankful to have grown up in a world filled with stories.

I moved to New York because I thrive there.

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

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.

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

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 nation should wrestle with the question of what it means to defend itself, what it means to take revenge.

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.

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.