Deborah Eisenberg
Deborah Eisenberg was born on November 20, 1945, in Winnetka, a community that formed part of her American background. She was educated at Marlboro College and later at The New School, and she has worked in English throughout her career as a writer, playwright, and actor.
Her professional life has extended across those several roles, with teaching forming another strand of her work. She served as a professor of writing at Columbia University, bringing her practice into an academic setting. The honors she has received are considerable in number and range: a Guggenheim Fellowship, an O. Henry Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship — a gathering of recognitions from distinct institutions within American literary culture.
Eisenberg remains a citizen of the United States. Her professorship at Columbia University is among the concrete facts that locate her within American letters, as is her cataloguing by the Library of Congress under the authorized label "Eisenberg, Deborah."
Quotes by 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.”
It’s broadening. You meet people in your family you’d never happen to run into otherwise.
