Deborah Eisenberg
Deborah Eisenberg
Deborah Eisenbergis an American short-story writer, actress and teacher...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 November 1945
CityWinnetka, IL
CountryUnited States of America
monologue took written wrote
I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater.
bodily course lives sort total
I happen to be a 64-year-old woman who lives in Manhattan, so on and so forth, but am I the sum total of my sort of bodily coordinates? Well, of course not.
born determine discrete divided endlessly fact funny history humans inside moment physical rather stuff
I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you.
extended fall hours middle periods sort work
I find I often just fall into a stone-like sleep, right in the middle of the day, just sort of clonk. I can't work for extended periods when I'm beginning something. But if I'm at the end of something, I can work on for hours and hours and hours.
absolutely aware children extremely filled power
I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.
anonymity ludicrous york
I actually came to New York because it was very tolerant. You know, it seems preposterous, ludicrous thing to say in an interview, but I came for the anonymity particularly.
absolutely complete curl goal gutter imagine life stay terrified turned whose
For someone whose goal in life was to stay unemployed, I can't imagine what I thought was going to happen. I was so terrified of everything, I just thought I'd curl up in the gutter and die, and by a complete mistake, my life turned out to be absolutely wonderful.
consists cutting endless false patience seems useless
For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.
change course facto feels good
Writing does change you, and of course it feels good to do things, so you could say writing is de facto therapeutic. But really, one writes to write.
amount certain deal lives restrict smaller trying
We're all walking around trying to deal with a certain amount of shame, to repress it. And we restrict our mental lives to smaller and smaller areas.
art interested
To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.
experience matter public
The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicised so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy.
The first story I wrote was called 'Days,' and I have very little affection for it.
amazing
One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.