Quote

Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.

Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Findings
Opulent
Finding
Structural
Circumstances
Dissatisfaction
Longer
Returning
Way
Thrilling
Life
Pleased
Tolerate
Experienced

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This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
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Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.
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I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I’m guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn’t there.
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Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.
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Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.
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Oh we'll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone.
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Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.
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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.
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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.
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I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.
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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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What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
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If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.
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What I Suddenly Understand My job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life. ---> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.
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No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.
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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?
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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