Zitat des Tages von 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.
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.
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'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.
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 wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it.
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'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?'
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.
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.
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'm very interested in how people change.
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.
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.
I was resistant to the Internet. I was afraid of it.
Every nation should wrestle with the question of what it means to defend itself, what it means to take revenge.
I'm kind of in love with my theater agent. I'm a true naive about the theater, a total innocent.
So many people discuss, you know, Israel/Palestine as if it's people on a spectrum.
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.
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.
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.
Empathy is what obsesses me. And watching empathy recede in the world is terrifying.
So writing stories is not easier in comparison to the playwriting or translation; the stories are easier in league with them.
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.
When you see 'editor' on a book, there are many permutations of what that title can mean.
I think in circles; I speak in circles. I unravel my thoughts that way.
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.
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.
Whatever part of writing that is subconscious is a thing that no one has access to.
