Deborah Eisenberg

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 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.

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.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

Writing does change you, and of course it feels good to do things, so you could say writing is de facto therapeutic. But really, one writes to write.

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.

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 always need huge amounts of time to do anything.

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.