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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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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Thing
Fiction
Work
Changed
Time
Actually
Think
Fact
Thinking
Facts
Doesn
Realise
Come
Realising
Mean
Writer

More quotes by 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 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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them—listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.
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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It's finished. Everything went past, without me.
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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That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.
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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It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?
Jennifer Egan
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Technology makes everyone feel old. A laptop is old after two years. Someone always has something newer. Everyone seems to feel obsolete now, even the young.
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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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'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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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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[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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What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
Jennifer Egan