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
belongs claim experience few fit forefront human life people somehow wandering
The world belongs to no one. There are very few people who fit into the world. And part of the struggle of every human life is to somehow claim a place on the planet, but it's at the forefront of the experience of the wandering race. The wandering people.
course engaged fascinates given interested people texture
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.
call certainly figure hard lives ordinary people possible trivial
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.
running people our-family
It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise.
friendship people finding-yourself
time is as adhesive as love, and the more time you spend with someone the greater the likelihood of finding yourself with a permanent sort of thing to deal with that people casually refer to as 'friendship,' as if that were the end of the matter.
generally people
I'm not used to interviews. People don't generally interview waitresses.
believe people
I believe that people are what happened to their grandparents.
absolutely consider fiction human include involves matter matters people politics power relationships
Politics is a matter of human transaction. I consider absolutely everything political, because all fiction involves relationships between people, and relationships between people always include matters of power, of equity, of communication.
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.
call piece takes time towards whatever
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.
almost bernard named prize published receive teens
It's almost uncanny to receive a prize named in honor of Bernard Malamud. I must have been in my early teens when 'The Magic Barrel' was published and I first read it.