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I'm always happy, Sasha said. Sometimes I just forget.

Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Sasha
Forget
Happy
Sometimes
Always

More quotes by Jennifer Egan

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I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?
Jennifer Egan
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That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.
Jennifer Egan
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I grew up in the 70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends. Before the age of technology, it was also easier to just disappear from the face of the earth.
Jennifer Egan
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th blu nyt th stRs u can't c th hum tht nevr gOs awy
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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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Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.
Jennifer Egan
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Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.
Jennifer Egan
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No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.
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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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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I did go on safari in Kenya when I was 17, with my mother, stepfather and little brother, and I kept a careful journal of the experience that was very helpful in terms of my sensory impressions of Africa. I have traveled quite a bit at distinct times in my life, though now that I have kids I've settled down.
Jennifer Egan
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I'm very interested in the way the Internet has changed teenage life. Obviously it's very different from when I grew up, when there weren't even answering machines, much less computers. I was telling my children this the other day, and the little one said, Did you have electricity, Mom? and I was like okay, enough, kid.
Jennifer Egan
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So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.
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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Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.
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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Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.
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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It's finished. Everything went past, without me.
Jennifer Egan
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I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.
Jennifer Egan