Tag: Deborah Eisenberg
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‘A piece of fiction is a communication. You’re sending an urgent message in a bottle from your desert island. You hope that somebody’s going to find the bottle and open it… But the message that is found cannot be exactly the message you’ve sent. Whatever bunch of words the writer transmits requires a person, a…
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‘The stories of Katherine Mansfield were very important to me when I was a child. My parents owned a book of her stories that had big print and beautiful line drawings, and I thought it was a children’s book. The stories were like mist, and I read them over and over. And the magic property…
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‘When you start writing, your incredulity at the childish, incompetent, graceless thing that you’ve done is shattering. One of the advantages of having experience as a writer—and there aren’t many, in fact I can’t think of any other—is that you know you can make the horrible thing better, then you can make it better again,…
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‘When I was in high school, all my friends said they were going to be writers. And I thought, How come you get to be a writer, and I don’t? I thought WRITER was written on their foreheads and they saw it when they looked in the mirror, and I sure didn’t see it when I…
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‘But the real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with…
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‘I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we’re rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that’s inside of you. It seems…
Roseena Veronika Hussain 