Deborah Eisenberg

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.

It's certainly possible to write fiction that isn't trivial and isn't what people would call political, but it is very hard to figure out how, because our ordinary lives have such a strong tincture now of the whole world.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

For someone whose goal in life was to stay unemployed, I can't imagine what I thought was going to happen. I was so terrified of everything, I just thought I'd curl up in the gutter and die, and by a complete mistake, my life turned out to be absolutely wonderful.