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
change thinking one-day
Everything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction.
feelings persons
I'm a person with virtually no feelings.
looks lines way
Every moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and...the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line.
writing fiction done
Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.
real giving branches
Nothing is more fortifying than learning that you have a real reader, a reader who truly responds both accurately and actively. It gives you courage, and you feel, I can crawl out on the branch a little further. It’s going to hold.
writing reality earthquakes
You write something and there’s no reality to it. You can’t inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse.
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.
thinking ideas way
I don't think things are ever exactly the way one expects, and I don't think things are ever the way one assumes they are at the moment. What I actually think is that one has no idea of what things are like, ever.
essence giving tasks
The task is not primarily to have a story, but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk, that give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure the essence. In other words, the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative.
writing horror triviality
When one writes, there’s the double horror of discovering not only what it is that one so fears but also the triviality of that fear.
running people our-family
It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise.
writing holy stills
I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. It’s not something to be approached casually.
stars dancer intuition
Her professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her assertions.