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There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.

Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Right
Many
Thing
Metaphors
Way
Metaphor
Never
Exactly
Ways
Wrong

More quotes by Jennifer Egan

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Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them.
Jennifer Egan
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Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.
Jennifer Egan
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We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
Jennifer Egan
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I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.
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
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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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I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.
Jennifer Egan
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'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.
Jennifer Egan
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Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?
Jennifer Egan
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What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
Jennifer Egan
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Sure, everything is ending, Jules said, but not yet.
Jennifer Egan
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I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.
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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When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?
Jennifer Egan
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Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase meant to be--usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people.
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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This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
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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The problem was precision, perfection the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.
Jennifer Egan
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I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
Jennifer Egan