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" 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. "

Nathan Englander

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" 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. "

Nathan Englander

" I didn't sleep the night I finished 'Sister Hills.' It was so unsettling. I felt really wild. I didn't have a clue. It's a very loaded subject, and I did not know what I had. I was interested in watching how choices unfold over time. It's a story that's raising questions. "

Nathan Englander

" My mother raised me very clearly that if you cross the street, you will die. If you go outside, you will die. If you play sports, you will likely die. That's what I was getting at home. "

Nathan Englander

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

Nathan Englander

" 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

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

Nathan Englander

" 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. "

Nathan Englander

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

Nathan Englander

" 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

" There was a summer in college where I worked for a stretch picking up garbage at the beach. On the early shift, it was very meditative walking the shoreline and crisscrossing the sand, picking up the junk people had dropped or tossed or that the ocean had returned. And there was this strange fantasy element to it. "

Nathan Englander

" 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

" Human experience is infinite. Lives are infinite. Stories are infinite. Just because one story has gravity in it doesn't mean you can't write a different one with gravity in it. "

Nathan Englander

" 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. "

Nathan Englander

" I spent my whole childhood being told, 'Israel is surrounded by enemies who are trying to push it into the sea.' But can't Gaza feel the same way? Personally, I'm frozen in time. "

Nathan Englander

" 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. "

Nathan Englander

" So many people discuss, you know, Israel/Palestine as if it's people on a spectrum. "

Nathan Englander

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

Nathan Englander

" 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. "

Nathan Englander

" For a book to function... it has to be a functioning reality. The character has to be real, and I imagine that's exactly what happens for a spy who is in deep cover. "

Nathan Englander

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

Nathan Englander

" 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. "

Nathan Englander

" 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. "

Nathan Englander

" 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. "

Nathan Englander

" I love those books and movies where someone turns because they're blackmailed or they're passed over for promotion. "

Nathan Englander

" There's an Armed Forces Haggadah and an Alcoholics Anonymous Haggadah and an LGBT Haggadah. Some people make a new Haggadah every year. It's a real living document... They're just constantly made throughout time. "

Nathan Englander

" I'm very interested in how people change. "

Nathan Englander

" Whatever part of writing that is subconscious is a thing that no one has access to. "

Nathan Englander

" 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. "

Nathan Englander

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

Nathan Englander

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

Nathan Englander