Quotes from Deborah Eisenberg

she just seemed to have been put together more on purpose than other people.

It's not so hard to figure out why I'm not sleeping. What I can't figure out is why everybody else is sleeping.

Sure she wanted him to be someone else, or at least sort of someone else. Pretty much everyone wants everyone else to be at least sort of someone else, don't they?

Everything makes me angry, unless it makes me sad.

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

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.

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.

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

I believe that people are what happened to their grandparents.

Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.

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.

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.

I always need huge amounts of time to do anything.

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.

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.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.