Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Related Quotes:

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

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

Nathan Englander

Call

Now

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 was resistant to the Internet. I was afraid of it. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

Nathan Englander

Early

Influence

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "