Jennifer Egan Quotes
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I always feel very afraid as I work on books. It's just so hard to write a decent book!
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You can research until you're falling asleep, but that still doesn't mean you're really fluent in the material.
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Time is always a component of place; you can't really talk about where without talking about when.
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To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.
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I'm not a technophobe, but I'm pretty old fashioned.
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Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.
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If having a story that's compelling - you want to know what will happen - is traditional, then ultimately I am a traditionalist. That is what readers care about. It's what I care about as a reader. Now if I can have that along with a strong girding of ideas and some kind of exciting technical forays - then that is just the jackpot.
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I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works - which are usually, in the end, more creative visions unto themselves than illuminating explanations.
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I love the thriller genre generally. I like murder mysteries and those kinds of adventure stories.
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Between books, I have to throw out everything I did before, because the tools I've used to write the previous book will not only not work for the next project, they will ruin it.
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I think the big lesson I've learned is that it's very hard to write satire in America because almost immediately, whatever you've thought of turns out to come true, or sometimes it already was true.
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I was not a punk rocker, absolutely not, but I certainly knew quite a lot of them, and I definitely went to the Mab - it was raw, interesting intense scene, so I was very drawn to it, but I was a total outsider.
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Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.
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Life itself is so surprising, a predictable story is unsatisfying.
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I'm a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.
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It's the feeling of being lifted out of my life into another world that is the thrill of writing fiction.
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In the case of 'Goon Squad,' which sold slowly for a long time despite the good reviews, those 'best of 2010' lists were pivotal, and made the book really sell.
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I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.
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When I think about a book like 'A Clockwork Orange,' which I really loved, the weird hybrid language is what I remember most.
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I guess my comfort zone as a writer is diametrically opposed to my comfort zone as a human being.
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I loved every minute of my childhood - sunbathing on the fire escape, digging for buried treasure in the back yard, pulling alewives out of the sand... Then it was all taken away from me. I came back every summer to visit my father until I was 18, but I was always the outsider.
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I would go so far as to say that I mostly write terrible things. I mean, my first drafts are so appalling.
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When I pick up a book that's, you know, wreathed in laurels, I expect a lot, and that doesn't give the book its best chance to shine.
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I grew up as a step-kid, always a little outside, always trying hard to follow and fit in. But over time, I've come to feel that my tendency toward self-erasure is a deep and real part of me. I think I'd be this way no matter how I grew up.