Nathan Englander Quotes

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.

Every story is different, so what is a detail in one might not be in something else. Diversity is something I embrace and love about my work.

I've always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.

There's nothing more fun to me than new characters and a new world.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

I think that it is expansive for the mind, for the fantasy of children and grownups alike, to understand that the world is huge. There is so much in the world to experience, and the odds are so essential to life.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

Part of the reasons I have lived the life I have is because I wanted to have an adventurous life. But my best adventures are more literary than political.

I'm constantly surprised by human nature and humanity. And I think that's why I love what I do: because I love to story-tell and bring new characters to life.

You never know what you're going to end up with when you sit down to write something. At the end, if it holds, it can do this multifarious thing - which is to open things rather than close them, to make them bigger rather than smaller, to cross those divides which we live every day of our lives.

I write and I read, and I write and read my way into and out of ideas and life. And that's what we do. That's what storytellers do.

Fiction writing is just an excuse to go discover interesting things.

I'm not going to lie; the most fun of writing these books is just saying, 'Where am I going to write about? Let me go there!'

I look for stories everywhere.

To me, fiction is the single best way there is - to me, it's the most profound way - of dealing with questions that have no answers.

For me, the best moments in storytelling are the ones where I feel I'm discovering something.

I think the most rewarding part for me is kind of not knowing where the story's going next, and then finding out and being blown away by it.

What I love about 'Toast' is that there's always new stuff you can do with him.

If you know everything, it keeps you from writing. You don't want a story to burn you out instead of surprising you.