Writing Quote by Deborah Eisenberg

““When you start writing, your incredulity at the childish, incompetent, graceless thing you've done is shattering. One of the advantages of having experience as a writer - and there aren't many, in face I can't think of any other - is that you know you can make the horrible thing better, then you can make it better again, then you can make it better again. And you may not be able to make it good, but at least it's not going to be what you're looking at now.””

Deborah Eisenberg

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More by Deborah Eisenberg

“When I was a kid, I used to wonder (I bet everyone did) whether there was somebody somewhere on the earth, or even in the universe, or ever had been in all of time, who had had exactly the same experience that I was having at that moment, and I hoped so badly that there was. But I realized then…

Deborah Eisenberg

Art is inherently subversive. It’s destabilizing. It undermines what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda.

Deborah Eisenberg

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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…

Deborah Eisenberg

“Stop that Stuart," Patty said as Stuart struggled with the suitcases, which were too heavy for him, she thought. (Almost everything was way too heavy for Stuart.)" Just put those down. Besides," Patty said, "where will you go? You don't have anyplace to go." But Stuart took her hand and held it for a moment against his closed eyes, and…

Deborah Eisenberg

It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise.

Deborah Eisenberg

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“When I was in high school, all my friends said they were going to be writers. And I thought, How come you get to be a writer, and I don’t? I thought WRITER was written on their foreheads and they saw it when they looked in the mirror, and I sure didn’t see it when I looked in the mirror.…

Deborah Eisenberg

Everything makes me angry, unless it makes me sad.

Deborah Eisenberg

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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…

Deborah Eisenberg

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The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicized so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of…

Deborah Eisenberg

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“Just think! Garden, garden, garden, garden, garden, two happy people, and it could have gone on forever! They knew, they'd been told, but they…

Deborah Eisenberg

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time is as adhesive as love, and the more time you spend with someone the greater the likelihood of finding yourself with a permanent…

Deborah Eisenberg

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“I turned with the receiver to the wall as I absorbed the fact of Ivan’s voice, and when I glanced back at the man on my sofa, he seemed like a scrap of paper, or the handle from a broken cup, or a single rubber band—a thing that has become dislodged from its rightful place and intrudes on one’s consciousness…

Deborah Eisenberg

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