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'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.

I feel very lucky that I have this career that allows me to say, 'I'm ready to start now on this project,' and I can go and do it.

I'd say that in place of a singular phobic-level terror, I keep a whole collection of running, yet manageable, fears.

Everything is so much clearer once a world is framed. Maybe it sounds crazy, but with writing, it's infinity that is limiting and the limited that allows for the truly infinite. Once all those elements are in place in a story, the brain is truly freed up to imagine without end.

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.

I didn't sleep the night I finished 'Sister Hills.' It was so unsettling. I felt really wild. I didn't have a clue. It's a very loaded subject, and I did not know what I had. I was interested in watching how choices unfold over time. It's a story that's raising questions.

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.

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 love those books and movies where someone turns because they're blackmailed or they're passed over for promotion.

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.

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.