Jennifer Egan Quotes
I learned you have to move fast, writing futuristic satire in America: Before you know it, you're a realist!
Quotes to Explore
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I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.
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I'm resigned to the fact that the corseted history of America is not as exciting as that of Britain.
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If we pulled out of Iraq tomorrow, Islamic jihadism is on the rise. And they continue, as we see in Lebanon, to seek to destroy the State of Israel and seek to drive America back and bring us to our knees. We must stand tall and straight.
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I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life.
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Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
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I really believed that my songs were good enough for the whole world to listen to. I had fans from America or the U.K. who would be like, 'Oh my God, I love your music'.
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Is there an equality of power between America and Iraq? Definitely not; however, the Iraqi people are standing fast and are defending their land courageously.
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Normally, most writers don't say, 'I'm going into a mild hypnotic trance.' Typically, they don't know how they do it. Most people, when they have a good experience writing, they're well placed in that state, which is also sometimes called a 'flow state.' If you don't have trouble, you don't have to think about it.
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Black people were very angry with me for writing the book. A lot of people didn't believe me, or didn't want to believe me, and that used to really bother me. It was a very painful and difficult time.
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The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
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Very often, writing a song is a process that happens to me rather than one that I instigate. I feel a song coming on and, like a sneeze; I wait for it until it comes.
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I can ask for a £25,000 advance, but then you spend a year writing the book, and £25,000 is a loan against sales, and you can easily spend five years earning out. So that's £25,000 for six years.
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Personal relationships are usually my biggest inspirations for writing my songs. The best way for me to write a song is to visualise the story in my head, and I start humming a melody, and before you know it, a song is born.
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Eighty percent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe.
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As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.
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My dad is Irish. I spent my childhood going back and forth between Ireland and America.
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Something in a writer's brain needs to watch everything with a detached, amoral eye.
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I gave up writing children's books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from 'Punch': as I have always wanted to escape. In vain.
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Ramesh Ponnuru and others say Obama is a conventional liberal. But conventional liberals don't come out for the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Conventional liberals don't return the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. Conventional liberals don't block oil drilling in America while subsidizing oil drilling in Brazil.
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You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.
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I'm interested in animation. I actually feel like I've learned so much about the process how to make an animated movie.
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I respect his talents, even as he does mine.
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As the great naturalist Charles Darwin saw clearly, individual and collective interests often coincide, as in the invisible hand narrative. But he also saw that in many other cases, interests at the two levels are squarely in conflict, and that in those cases, individual interests generally trump. That simple observation suggests that market failure is often the result not of insufficient competition (the traditional charge from social critics on the Left), but of the very logic of competition itself.
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I learned you have to move fast, writing futuristic satire in America: Before you know it, you're a realist!
