Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

You

Way

World

Related Quotes:

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

Nathan Englander

Call

Now

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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 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

Seeing

Looking

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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?' "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

Nathan Englander

Early

Influence

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "