Jennifer Egan Quotes
It's our job as fiction writers to provide a delight that nothing else can - to such a degree that people have no choice but to read our work. Now that's a very tall order, if not impossible. But why not try?
Quotes to Explore
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There has never been a female director who has won an Oscar. There has only been one woman who won at the Cannes Film Festival.
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When you are tough on yourself, life is going to be infinitely easier on you.
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When I was in the private sector, I found it immensely useful to go out and talk to customers and co-workers.
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The next day, I got a phone call from him and he told me to come and read for a movie called New Jack City. So I went over there and they told me I was gonna wear dreads and play a cop.
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All of the characters in my films, they share one commonality. It doesn't matter whether they are good or bad, it doesn't matter whether they are smart or stupid, these characters all take responsibility for their own behavior. I'm much the same.
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Starting in business is like getting married... there is really no good time and no bad time. The time is now.
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I try to basically keep my opinions to myself when it comes to people who are charged with crimes that I don't know anything about.
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Acting can be a narrow and isolated experience, because you only examine your particular part.
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I generally wake up at 4:30, have breakfast No. 1, then get to the pool by 5 a.m.
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If I buy a game on Steam and I'm running it on Windows, I can go to one of the Steam machines and already have the game. So you benefit as a developer; you benefit as a consumer in having the PC experience extended in the living room.
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I can't deal with someone flashy. That's so not me.
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When I was 23, I founded an organization called Dress for Success, which is now in more than 100 cities in 8 countries and has helped a million women transition from welfare to work.
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I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.
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I prefer the countryside to cities. This is also true of my films: I have made more films in rural societies, and villages, than in towns.
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For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise.
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When I was a kid, I wanted desperately to be a jazz musician. I would practice the trumpet for hours, but when I got braces, that messed up my ability to play, so all of a sudden I had all this free time.
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Money is a kind of poetry.
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As we women know, there are so many other hurdles that we have to cross that I would love it if we could stop having the race conversation so that we can get women further on. You know, a female president now that we have an African American president. Maybe we can get an Asian female, a gay person?
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Of course, this is one of the really important things about art, that you can make more than you can understand at the moment the thing is being made. But the gap between what we recognize inside ourselves - our feelings- and our ability to trust ourselves and to trust exposing ourselves to those ideas, can be great.
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The web and physical world is plagued with abundance - people need help sorting through all the good and bad stuff out there. The tyranny of choice is causing major psychic pain and frustration for people.
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The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts... Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.
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It's our job as fiction writers to provide a delight that nothing else can - to such a degree that people have no choice but to read our work. Now that's a very tall order, if not impossible. But why not try?
