“I’m very interested in how people change.”
― Nathan Englander
“Empathy is what obsesses me. And watching empathy recede in the world is terrifying.”
― 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
“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’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
“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
“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
“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
“So many people discuss, you know, Israel/Palestine as if it’s people on a spectrum.”
― Nathan Englander
“I’m kind of in love with my theater agent. I’m a true naive about the theater, a total innocent.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“When you see ‘editor’ on a book, there are many permutations of what that title can mean.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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
“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.”
― Nathan Englander
“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
“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
“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.”
― Nathan Englander
“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
“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
“So writing stories is not easier in comparison to the playwriting or translation; the stories are easier in league with them.”
― 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
“I always call myself either an optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist – I’m not sure which way it goes.”
― Nathan Englander
“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
“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
“I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that’s it.”
― Nathan Englander
“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
“I love those books and movies where someone turns because they’re blackmailed or they’re passed over for promotion.”
― Nathan Englander
“Philip Roth has been a huge influence on me. The early books I read in my teens and twenties.”
― Nathan Englander
“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.”
― Nathan Englander
“I was resistant to the Internet. I was afraid of it.”
― Nathan Englander
“Twitter is the best art for writers. I find it enticing.”
― 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
“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
“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 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
“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 moved to New York because I thrive there.”
― Nathan Englander
“Whatever part of writing that is subconscious is a thing that no one has access to.”
― 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
“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
“You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.”
― Nathan Englander
“I think in circles; I speak in circles. I unravel my thoughts that way.”
― Nathan Englander
“Every nation should wrestle with the question of what it means to defend itself, what it means to take revenge.”
― Nathan Englander
“There’s no such thing as being a cultural Jew. You’re religious or you’re not.”
― Nathan Englander
“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
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