Jennifer Egan Quotes
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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 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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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.
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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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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 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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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.
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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.
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The book that is the closest genetically to 'Goon Squad' is 'Look at Me.' It has the futuristic element - although, freakishly, almost every aspect I invented has come to pass in some way, including the terrorist who fantasies about blowing up the World Trade Centre. That was extremely uncomfortable. The book came out on the week of 9/11.
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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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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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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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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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Time is always a component of place; you can't really talk about where without talking about when.
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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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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'm not a technophobe, but I'm pretty old fashioned.
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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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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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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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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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I blurb a lot of books by women, and I'm eager to provide encouragement and support for young women.
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I have this dream again and again: I find extra rooms in the place where I live. You could say it's a very New York dream, but I think it's about writing - the feeling that there is something behind a wall or a door.