Deborah Eisenberg

I suppose I'm always looking for a sort of acuity of perception either in my characters or about my characters.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.

I believe that people are what happened to their grandparents.

It's certainly possible to write fiction that isn't trivial and isn't what people would call political, but it is very hard to figure out how, because our ordinary lives have such a strong tincture now of the whole world.

I didn't want to write travelogues.

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.

Of course I want to have a deliciously seductive story on the surface which will keep people engaged and amused, but primarily, I'm interested in other things. It's the texture of any given moment that fascinates me: what is really going on between people or in somebody's mind.

I'm constantly trying to strip away layers of perceived thought or cliche.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

I always need huge amounts of time to do anything.

To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.

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.

I had no thought of being a writer. I never wanted to do anything. I'm tremendously lazy.

I'm not used to interviews. People don't generally interview waitresses.

I'm a very spoiled writer. I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I'm inefficient.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

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.

I just want to be on my own branch twittering.

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.