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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.
Jennifer Egan -
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.
Jennifer Egan
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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.
Jennifer Egan -
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.
Jennifer Egan -
If you can write any way and it's working out, just bow down in gratitude.
Jennifer Egan -
I love the infinite variety of New York, how it's the epicenter of so many worlds.
Jennifer Egan -
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.
Jennifer Egan -
I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.
Jennifer Egan
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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.
Jennifer Egan -
I never did anything original my whole childhood. I was invisible.
Jennifer Egan -
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.
Jennifer Egan -
As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.
Jennifer Egan -
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?
Jennifer Egan -
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.
Jennifer Egan
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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.
Jennifer Egan -
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.
Jennifer Egan -
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.
Jennifer Egan