Jennifer Egan Quotes
Reading is a lot like eating for me: If I try to read a book I'm not hungry for, I won't enjoy it, but if I wait until I have a real appetite for something, I'll devour it.
Quotes to Explore
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I was raised Catholic in Rockford, Illinois. But I'm not a practicing Catholic anymore. Oh God, no.
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There is nothing more exciting in sport when the top two countries in the world are battling for the Ashes.
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I wanted to define the vocabulary of a wedding both visually and intellectually. The book is about more than weddings or wedding dresses. It's a metaphor for women's lives, their creativity.
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It happens that I'm heterosexual, but I don't care about that. I do care about protecting the rights of 10 percent of our population who are homosexual and who don't have the ability to protect their rights.
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Creating things sometimes is difficult.
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Twenty million more have Chronic Kidney Disease, where patients experience a gradual deterioration of kidney function, the end result of which is kidney failure.
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The first single I released, 'Anything Goes,' is probably one of the best-written songs I've heard in a long time. It takes somebody knowing who you are. Sometimes writers know who an artist is and what they want to say and how they sing. I will never be opposed to cutting a song if somebody nails my life and what I'm going through.
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Over the years, humans have managed to incorporate nearly every element, light and weighty, common and obscure, into our daily lives. And given how small atoms are and how many of them there are all around us, it's almost certain that your body has at least brushed against an atom of every single natural element on the periodic table.
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Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
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I'm a bit of a fashion magpie.
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I just always wanted to be left alone to go into a creative space.
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Like some high official, you have to tell your brain: 'Do it. Come on. I have to do it.'
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I'm all over the place, and I consider myself a bit of a scrounger: 'What will I do next, so I'm not broke?'
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It should take you 15 minutes to make a song, and then get out of there.
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Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
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I like to get up around 5:30 or six - that's my favorite time of day. My family is still asleep, and the office is still closed, so I can start my day slowly.
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I'm a slow starter.
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I've written a screenplay that is a series of monologues and songs; they form this sort of human tapestry across time and place. The form is strange, but I find it really fascinating.
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It's only the losers named 'Dave' that think having an unusual name is bad, and who cares what they think? They're named 'Dave.'
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The white men despise the Indians, and drive them from their homes. But the Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian, and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies; Indians do not steal. An Indian, who is as bad as the white men, could not live in our nation; he would be put to death, and eat up by the wolves.
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Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
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Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.
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It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined- a dummy creation that little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble.
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Reading is a lot like eating for me: If I try to read a book I'm not hungry for, I won't enjoy it, but if I wait until I have a real appetite for something, I'll devour it.
