Jennifer Egan Quotes
-
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.
-
I grew up in the '70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends.
-
My first attempt at writing a novel was horrible. I had to throw it away. But I stuck with the idea, which is what became 'The Invisible Circus.'
-
I'm not a technophobe, but I'm pretty old fashioned.
-
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.
-
One of my strengths as a writer is that I'm a good problem-solver. I write these unthinking, ungoverned first drafts. The project for me always is to turn that instinctive stuff into pages that work.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
You can research until you're falling asleep, but that still doesn't mean you're really fluent in the material.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It's the feeling of being lifted out of my life into another world that is the thrill of writing fiction.
-
Time is always a component of place; you can't really talk about where without talking about when.
-
That adage about 'Write what you know' is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I'm curious to find out.
-
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 would go so far as to say that I mostly write terrible things. I mean, my first drafts are so appalling.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When I think about a book like 'A Clockwork Orange,' which I really loved, the weird hybrid language is what I remember most.
-
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 always feel very afraid as I work on books. It's just so hard to write a decent book!
-
Life itself is so surprising, a predictable story is unsatisfying.
-
As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.