Deborah Eisenberg Quotes

When I write, I make discoveries about my feelings.

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

Writing a poem is discovering.

I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

You go out into the world, you read everything you can read, you imitate the things you love, and you learn how hard it is to do. Eventually, you learn your own vision of the world, you learn your own voice and how to hear it, and you learn to write your own work. Writers today have as many opportunities as my generation did, but they don't see the examples as clearly as we did.

I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb.

For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.

Writing is the act of discovery.

In teaching writing, I'm learning new things about writing.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

I tend to like order in almost every other aspect of my life, but for me, the process of writing is really chaotic and decadent and indulgent.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

As you write plays, you discover what you believe. And until you know what you believe, you can't write a play.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery....I write to find out what I'm thinking about.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.

What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.

My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you're not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You're actually discovering in the writing process, you're actually creating knowledge.

The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.

You get caught up in a cycle at some point, so I broke the cycle and decided; I'm going to really write a lot of books, because I need to get in touch with that part of myself in order to make more music.