Jennifer Egan Quotes
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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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My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.
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Both my own process and that of the publishing industry are just too slow to do anything other than play catch-up when it comes to anticipating change.
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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.
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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 never did anything original my whole childhood. I was invisible.
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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.
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I teach intermittently, and while I enjoy it, I don't find that it's a calling for me.
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The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.
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I wasn't a kid who wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a doctor. I was kind of morbid. I was really into the body and how it could go wrong. I wanted to dig up bodies from the graveyard.
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Remaining a pop phenomenon for 20 years without dying or lapsing into self-parody is quite a feat.
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I can't even imagine writing nonfiction by hand. I think if I didn't have a computer, I just couldn't do it. Maybe it's a brain-section issue.
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I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.
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I'm not sure if the passage of time affects our core identities so much as reveals them to us.
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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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There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.
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I was a stepchild in two different families. The hardest thing about being a stepchild is you know that in some way everything would be easier if you didn't exist.
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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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In terms of rock and roll, I'm often drawn to louder, rougher stuff; maybe that's my history as a punk rock wannabee showing itself! Honestly, though, I'm not one of those people who listens to music constantly. I really love silence.
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If I'm doing something I know I can pull off, then that's not the book I should be writing.
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I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up.
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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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Fiction is my deepest love, but I love journalism, too. It keeps me thinking vigorously, and it reminds me that there is a world out there.
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I have a hatred of familiarity. If I feel like I am doing something I've done before, it feels old and done. I feel I have no choice but to strike out in directions that feel new - anything less just doesn't seem worth it.