Deborah Eisenberg Quotes

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.

As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

I've tried to tell a story. For me, it is the best one.

Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.

I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

I never thought I could write fiction.

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

Fiction is socially meaningful.

I think of myself as a storyteller.

Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

I've always been passionate about the stories I want to tell.

I don't read fiction.