Nathan Englander

I lived in Jerusalem with the Temple Mount as my holy site. My Palestinian neighbors lived in Al-Quds with the Haram al-Sharif.

Sometimes I feel like those born-again folk, always working on their faith, but I'm always working on my atheism. We all have our struggles.

I'm very interested in how people change.

Empathy is what obsesses me. And watching empathy recede in the world is terrifying.

There's no such thing as being a cultural Jew. You're religious or you're not.

You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.

I was resistant to the Internet. I was afraid of it.

I hardly grew up mono-lingually! I was raised religious, so there's a tradition of semi-access to a second language. When I learned my ABCs, they taught us our Aleph-Bet at the same time.

I don't think it's the writer's job to give answers or to give opinions. In fact, when a writer has answers, I think the work ends up being corrupted. It becomes didactic. What a book does is share a consciousness and invite people to explore the questions as best as you can.

When I wrote my novel, 'The Ministry of Special Cases,' I couldn't even brush my teeth. I had to write in isolation from everything else. I thought a play would take away from my fiction, but the more projects I work on, the more time I have.

With each book, I've found myself more and more able to draw off the personal and still be as vulnerable as I need to be as a writer.