Nathan Englander Quotes

I've always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience.

I do truly believe that the smallest stories can wind up being the biggest because it's through the specific that a writer can best access the universal.

What I've learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal - or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

My varied listening palette is all-inclusive of all walks of life. No one individual is exempt from the human experience, so it is that intangible that is a universal truth. In that regard, I've had success in encapsulating something cosmic.

With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.

That's what was so amazing about 'Mulan.' Here is this story with all Chinese characters, and yet so many people related to her character and loved the story. So I really think as long as you have a good story that relates to a lot of people, it doesn't matter what ethnicity it is.

When you're writing about one community, in a way, you're writing about all communities.

The great thing about fiction is you can talk about things without being didactic about them, but hopefully forge a connection with people and an understanding about a shared humanity that tells its own story.

We love stories about identity and acceptance because they're so universal.

You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren't they?

I don't think you can bring the races together by joking about the differences between them. I'd rather talk about the similarities, about what's universal in their experiences.

I have a pretty diverse audience, and that makes me happy - laughter is universal, and I don't differentiate between people at all. Why should I? People are people. There's no reason why one person can't relate to any other person on this planet in some way or another.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

The most important thing to realise is that everyone is capable of telling a story. It doesn't matter where we were born or how we grew up.

And I'm happy to say that I'm able to find people wherever I go that are not black, not white - they're just human beings. That's where I am, where I've been and where I intend to stay.

I love relatable stories.

You say to yourself: 'What could people, in all these countries, find in my books?' and yet I think we're all the same, anywhere. Everybody is a hero or a dramatic person in their own story if you just know where to look.

I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers.

All art to me is an empathetic act. Whoever's telling a story is trying to transfer emotion into someone else.

Depending on the story that you're telling, you can be relatable to everybody or nobody. I try and tell everybody's story.

Orlando's a part of me. The next guy's a part of me. And the next guy's a part of me. That's all I'm trying to do, is tell cool stories that people can relate to.