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

Nathan Englander

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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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

Nathan Englander

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

Nathan Englander

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

Nathan Englander

" 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. "

Nathan Englander

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

Nathan Englander

" I think in circles; I speak in circles. I unravel my thoughts that way. "

Nathan Englander

" 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?' "

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

" 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

" What I'm trying to say is that a lot that lies behind being able to live the writing life is psychological and wrapped up in ideas of self-definition. "

Nathan Englander

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

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Nathan Englander

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

Nathan Englander

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

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

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

Nathan Englander

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

Nathan Englander

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

Nathan Englander

" 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

" 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