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" 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. "

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" 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

Night

Sister

Choices

" 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. "

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

Nathan Englander

Early

Influence

" Palestine isn't a state when it concerns statehood. When it comes to warring, it's a state, yes? The Palestinians, they live in a country, for the purpose of war. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

Nathan Englander

Call

Now

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

" 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. "

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

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

" I'm just very interested, fascinated, heartbroken, obsessed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and our need to find peace on that front... Everyone's always, like, victim and avenger at the same time. "

" 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'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?' "

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

" Everything is so much clearer once a world is framed. Maybe it sounds crazy, but with writing, it's infinity that is limiting and the limited that allows for the truly infinite. Once all those elements are in place in a story, the brain is truly freed up to imagine without end. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I always call myself either an optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist - I'm not sure which way it goes. "

" 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. "

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

" 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'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

" 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. "

" 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. "