Jennifer Egan Quotes
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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.
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The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material.
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When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities.
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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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I love the infinite variety of New York, how it's the epicenter of so many worlds.
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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 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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There are a lot of writers who find a groove and spend a career mining that vein. I seem to be exactly the opposite.
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I often felt like that Mr. Magoo figure in the cartoon, who just wanders through traffic, and somehow it never hits him. I kind of feel that way about my whole childhood: Why do I have a normal life?
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Comparison is painful. Don't be cowed by other people's pretty pictures. When you feel unimpressive, or irrelevant, that has nothing to do with what you're actually capable of.
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I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my services.
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When I had my first child, I didn't write for a year, and I felt when I tried to start again I might actually not be able to do it anymore. I really could not do it well, and I felt out of sorts with it.
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I don't really begin with ideas about genre. I certainly wrote a gothic novel, 'The Keep,' that conformed to and, in some ways, played with every convention I knew of to work with in the gothic, but the way I came to it was very instinctive and visceral.
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I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
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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'm obsessed with the Victorian novel. I can't help it. I feel like the novel then was so powerful and agile in ways I'm not sure it is now.
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Sometimes I'll watch teenagers and find myself not quite believing I'm older than they are - even wondering, delusionally, if they can see any difference between us.