DEBORAH EISENBERG

I'm a very spoiled writer. I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I'm inefficient.

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.

I suppose I'm always looking for a sort of acuity of perception either in my characters or about my characters.

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.

I didn't want to write travelogues.

I'm not used to interviews. People don't generally interview waitresses.

I had no thought of being a writer. I never wanted to do anything. I'm tremendously lazy.

I would like to never ever think about any political issues.

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.

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.

I would say the reason that I've never written a novel is because I've never written a novel.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

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.

I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.

It's much easier to read the stories that have a lot of dialogue; of course, they flow much more easily into speech.

I'm constantly trying to strip away layers of perceived thought or cliche.

The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicised so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy.

I'm a bit of an expert on anger, having suffered from it all through my youth, when I was both brunt and font. It's certainly the most miserable state to be in but it's also tremendously gratifying, really - rage feels justified.

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.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

The first story I wrote was called 'Days,' and I have very little affection for it.

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.

For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.