Nathan Englander Quotes

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

As a writer, my only responsibility is to tell a compelling story.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

It's not easy to tell a story about writers and make that feel like a complete story and an interesting story.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.

My story is very long. And for somebody to write a good story, one needs a good writer, too.

There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.

I'm not a good crime writer. I'm not good with plots... so I have to do something else.

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

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?

My stories are character driven.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

I feel like I know how to write plot.