Nathan Englander Quotes

I moved to New York because I thrive there.

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.

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.

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’d much prefer my books to shoes…In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

You cannot learn to curse like an American.

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

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.

The Israel Palestine thing, there are infinite sides to each side, but if we stick to the main sides, everybody’s in the same boat and it’s maddening to me for people not to understand what’s in both their best interest.

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.

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.

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.

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

I feel like people who become writers are people who have been saved by books.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I would drink gallons of coffee a day. Even now, off caffeine, I talk faster than anyone you’ve ever met. I finally recognized that I’m naturally amped up. But when I quit I was worried that I would never write again. It was like anyone who’s kicked a habit. I was in a blanket shivering, trying to kick the horse.