62 Quotes by Deborah Eisenberg

The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicized so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy. A lot of fiction comes out of a child’s feeling of, “Hey, that’s not fair.”

The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay right behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen by.

I was looking out at cliffs and the sea, all sluiced in delicate pinks and yellows and greens and blues, as if the sun were imparting to the sleeping rock and water dreams of their youth, dreams of the rock’s birth in the earth’s molten core, the water’s ecstatic purity before it was sullied by life – as if the play of soft colors were the sun’s lullaby to the cliffs and the sea, of endurance and transformation.

When you start writing, your incredulity at the childish, incompetent, graceless thing you’ve done is shattering. One of the advantages of having experience as a writer – and there aren’t many, in face I can’t think of any other – is that you know you can make the horrible thing better, then you can make it better again, then you can make it better again. And you may not be able to make it good, but at least it’s not going to be what you’re looking at now.

I don’t think things are ever exactly the way one expects, and I don’t think things are ever the way one assumes they are at the moment. What I actually think is that one has no idea of what things are like, ever.

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.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

I didn't want to write travelogues.