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" 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
Sports
You
Die
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" Twitter is the best art for writers. I find it enticing. "
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" The reason people get afraid of writing real, honest journalism and fiction, and the reason corrupted people and demagogues are afraid of journalism and fiction and poetry across the world, is because it is a subversive form. "
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" 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
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Up
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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. "
Nathan Englander
Age
Writing
Woman
" I'd say that in place of a singular phobic-level terror, I keep a whole collection of running, yet manageable, fears. "
Nathan Englander
Running
Keep
Collection
" I think in circles; I speak in circles. I unravel my thoughts that way. "
Nathan Englander
Way
Think
Circles
" 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
Way
Thankful
Think
" 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. "
Nathan Englander
Crazy
Story
End
" 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
Story
You
Just Because
" 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
Like
" 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
Work
Gone
Know
" So writing stories is not easier in comparison to the playwriting or translation; the stories are easier in league with them. "
Nathan Englander
Writing
Easier
Comparison
" I was resistant to the Internet. I was afraid of it. "
Nathan Englander
Afraid
Resistant
Internet
" 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
Language
Love
Over
" There's no such thing as being a cultural Jew. You're religious or you're not. "
Nathan Englander
Cultural
You
Being
" 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
Die
You
My Life
" 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
Jerusalem
Lived
Neighbors
" I always call myself either an optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist - I'm not sure which way it goes. "
Nathan Englander
Optimist
Myself
Pessimist
" Whatever part of writing that is subconscious is a thing that no one has access to. "
Nathan Englander
Subconscious
Whatever
Access
" 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
Personal
Off
Need
" Philip Roth has been a huge influence on me. The early books I read in my teens and twenties. "
Nathan Englander
Early
Influence
Me
" 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
Time
Trying
Sea
" 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
Follow
" 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. "
Nathan Englander
Easy
Universal
Woman
" Empathy is what obsesses me. And watching empathy recede in the world is terrifying. "
Nathan Englander
World
Watching
Terrifying
" When I was living in Jerusalem, I used to write in a coffee shop called Tmol Shilshom. I'd sit at the same table every day and work. And right next to my seat was a weathered wingback chair by a window. "
Nathan Englander
Coffee
Day
Work
" I don't think it's the writer's job to give answers or to give opinions. In fact, when a writer has answers, I think the work ends up being corrupted. It becomes didactic. What a book does is share a consciousness and invite people to explore the questions as best as you can. "
Nathan Englander
Job
Best
Work
" 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
Beach
College
Ocean
" 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
Lucky
Brain
Know
" 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
Writing
You
Been