Jennifer Egan Quotes
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I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, 'I'm going to ace this.' It's just not who I am.
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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 number my drafts, and by the time a book is done, I'll have 75 or 80 drafts of some sections.
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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 love the thriller genre generally. I like murder mysteries and those kinds of adventure stories.
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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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I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.
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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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It seemed impossible that a scrappy book like 'Goon Squad' could win an award like that. It's such an iconic honor. I think what the Pulitzer means to me is that I'll need to work very, very hard to try to live up to it.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.
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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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I always feel very afraid as I work on books. It's just so hard to write a decent book!
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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'm a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.
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Life itself is so surprising, a predictable story is unsatisfying.
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My mom used to say that if someone woke her up in the middle of the night and asked how old she was, she'd answer 27. Hearing her, I'd think, 'That's ridiculous; your job as my mom is to be old.'
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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 would go so far as to say that I mostly write terrible things. I mean, my first drafts are so appalling.