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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.

Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Feeling
Depressed
Feelings
Area
Writing
Heavy
Areas
Amount
Huge
Trouble
Almost

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Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.
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The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts that's what gets me the best material.
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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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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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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.
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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 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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Stu walked Bennie over to Chris in the chair and parted his hair to reveal some tan little creatures the size of poppy seeds moving around on his scalp. Bennie felt himself grow faint.'Lice' the barber whispered.'They get it at school'. 'But he goes to private school' Bernie had blurted.'In Crandale,New York!
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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.
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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.
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It's finished. Everything went past, without me.
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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.
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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.
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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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It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.
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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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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.
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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?
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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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