Quote

The answers were maddeningly absent—it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.

Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Like
Back
Bars
Without
Answers
Feel
Bring
Feels
Knew
Even
Song
Maddeningly
Trying
Artist
Absent
Made
Certain
Title
Way
Remember
Titles

More quotes by 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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Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.
Jennifer Egan
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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.
Jennifer Egan
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I loved every minute of my childhood - sunbathing on the fire escape, digging for buried treasure in the back yard, pulling alewives out of the sand... Then it was all taken away from me. I came back every summer to visit my father until I was 18, but I was always the outsider.
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 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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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.
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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[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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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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Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.
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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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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This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
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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I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, I'm going to ace this. It's just not who I am.
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'm always happy, Sasha said. Sometimes I just forget.
Jennifer Egan
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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.
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