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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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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Everybody
Talking
Sound
Whole
Time
People
Mailing
Stoned
Sounds

More quotes by 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.
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When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?
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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.
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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.
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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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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 am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
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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th blu nyt th stRs u can't c th hum tht nevr gOs awy
Jennifer Egan
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If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.
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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Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.
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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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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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.
Jennifer Egan
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And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
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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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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That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.
Jennifer Egan