Jennifer Egan Quotes
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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 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.
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I just think that, for my particular personality, feeling slightly invisible is always a help.
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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 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.
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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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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 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'm not sure if the passage of time affects our core identities so much as reveals them to us.
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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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I teach intermittently, and while I enjoy it, I don't find that it's a calling for me.
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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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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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As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.
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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 never did anything original my whole childhood. I was invisible.
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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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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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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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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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I love the infinite variety of New York, how it's the epicenter of so many worlds.
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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 try consciously to keep myself entertained and challenged to not repeat myself at all. Like, when I start a new book, my goal is to pretty much throw out what I've done and try something completely different that I think initially I cannot do.
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With 'The Keep,' I began with a theory about pitting the isolated disconnection of the gothic realm against present-day hyperconnectedness. I emerged feeling that the gothic genre is all about hyperconnectedness - the possibility of disembodied communication - and that we now live in a kind of permanently gothic state.