Jennifer Egan Quotes
-
I have a tendency to coddle my sons because I want to keep them safe, but I also want them to be strong and independent and curious and bold, and I worry that my coddling is going to have exactly the opposite effect.
-
I always feel very afraid as I work on books. It's just so hard to write a decent book!
-
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.
-
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.
-
You can research until you're falling asleep, but that still doesn't mean you're really fluent in the material.
-
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.
-
Life itself is so surprising, a predictable story is unsatisfying.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I'm not a technophobe, but I'm pretty old fashioned.
-
It's the feeling of being lifted out of my life into another world that is the thrill of writing fiction.
-
Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.
-
I'm a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.
-
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.
-
If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.
-
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.
-
When I think about a book like 'A Clockwork Orange,' which I really loved, the weird hybrid language is what I remember most.
-
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.
-
If you've been around as long as I have, watching the literary scene, then you know that who's in and who's out changes by the year. It's really a very fluid situation that requires that the person who is having the good luck now isn't having it a year or two from now.
-
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.
-
I just think that, for my particular personality, feeling slightly invisible is always a help.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I would go so far as to say that I mostly write terrible things. I mean, my first drafts are so appalling.