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We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.

Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Write
Sells
Back
Selling
Writing
Majors
Major
Paid
Line
Lines
Bullshit
Lying
Sell

More quotes by Jennifer Egan

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Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn't stemmed the suspicion that people's opinions weren't really their own. Who's paying you? was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter - who would let themselves be bought?
Jennifer Egan
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It's finished. Everything went past, without me.
Jennifer Egan
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I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.
Jennifer Egan
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[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.
Jennifer Egan
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I know I'm famous and irresitible - a combination whose properties closely resemble radioactivity - and I know that you in this room are helpless against me.
Jennifer Egan
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A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.
Jennifer Egan
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There's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to.
Jennifer Egan
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This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
Jennifer Egan
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Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.
Jennifer Egan
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Being somewhere but not completely: that was home for Danny. . . . All he needed was a cellphone or I-access, or both at once, or even just a plan to leave wherever he was and go someplace else really really soon.
Jennifer Egan
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Technology makes everyone feel old. A laptop is old after two years. Someone always has something newer. Everyone seems to feel obsolete now, even the young.
Jennifer Egan
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One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.
Jennifer Egan
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I think the one thing that's changed over time is that I've come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think it will work out, doesn't mean that it actually won't.
Jennifer Egan
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Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.
Jennifer Egan
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But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by identify, I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.
Jennifer Egan
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Stu walked Bennie over to Chris in the chair and parted his hair to reveal some tan little creatures the size of poppy seeds moving around on his scalp. Bennie felt himself grow faint.'Lice' the barber whispered.'They get it at school'. 'But he goes to private school' Bernie had blurted.'In Crandale,New York!
Jennifer Egan
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Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.
Jennifer Egan
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We're [writers] all afraid of writing badly, and there are psychological reasons, like the bad interior of ourselves is somehow being revealed, but we all fear that, and you can't write well if you're not willing to write badly. That's why you have to make writing a habit, so it feels normal and not strange.
Jennifer Egan
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th blu nyt th stRs u can't c th hum tht nevr gOs awy
Jennifer Egan
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I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
Jennifer Egan