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" I am a fifth-generation American, but from a young age, I went to yeshiva. I spent 12 hours a day with rabbis, and I think in Yiddish. To this day, I have to go back and unravel my writing and polish it so everyone doesn't sound like an old Jewish woman. "

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" I think my love for rhythm in language comes from repeating the same words, the same sounds, over and over again day after day for so many years. "

Nathan Englander

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" 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. "

" I know nobody believes in peace anymore, but what else is there to work toward? As the years have gone by, peace seems like more and more of an impossibility. "

" 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 feel very lucky that I have this career that allows me to say, 'I'm ready to start now on this project,' and I can go and do it. "

" I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it. "

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" Philip Roth has been a huge influence on me. The early books I read in my teens and twenties. "

Nathan Englander

Early

Influence

" I moved to New York because I thrive there. "

" 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?' "

" It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality. "

" When you're in a world, and your parents are one way, and you're told, 'This is how the whole world is, and this is how you're supposed to be,' and you're terribly unhappy in that world, it's a very scary thing. "

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

" There's no such thing as being a cultural Jew. You're religious or you're not. "

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

" 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. "

Nathan Englander

Safety

Dream

" 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. "

" I understand if everyone looking at me is seeing a Jew and seeing me as a kind of 'other.' But I can't be expected to see myself that way. That is, to me, Jewish is the normal way to be; it's not a type of being. "

Nathan Englander

Seeing

Looking

" 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. "

" You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I hardly grew up mono-lingually! I was raised religious, so there's a tradition of semi-access to a second language. When I learned my ABCs, they taught us our Aleph-Bet at the same time. "

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Tradition

Same

" So writing stories is not easier in comparison to the playwriting or translation; the stories are easier in league with them. "

" Sometimes I feel like those born-again folk, always working on their faith, but I'm always working on my atheism. We all have our struggles. "

Nathan Englander

Feel

Faith

" There was a terrible fear for me when I started writing, which was that if you'd been denied unbelievably tumultuous experience, you didn't have permission to write. "

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

" Twitter is the best art for writers. I find it enticing. "

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

" 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. "