Menu

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Deborah Eisenberg Quotes

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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

– Deborah Eisenberg

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

– Deborah Eisenberg

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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

– Deborah Eisenberg

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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

– Deborah Eisenberg

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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

– Deborah Eisenberg

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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

– Deborah Eisenberg

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

I’m a very spoiled writer. I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I’m inefficient.

– Deborah Eisenberg

I just want to be on my own branch twittering.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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.

– Deborah Eisenberg

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

– Deborah Eisenberg

I always need huge amounts of time to do anything.

– Deborah Eisenberg

To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.

– Deborah Eisenberg

Fiction is a report from the interior.

– Deborah Eisenberg