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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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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Stuff
Unafraid
Form
Badly
Better
Base
Writing
Forms
Something
Build
Willing
Often
Write

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I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.
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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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It's finished. Everything went past, without me.
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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.
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I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.
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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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And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
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Sure, everything is ending, Jules said, but not yet.
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th blu nyt th stRs u can't c th hum tht nevr gOs awy
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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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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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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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[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.
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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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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.
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Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.
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We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.
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I’m like America ” he said. Stephanie swung around to look at him unnerved. “What are you talking about ” she said. “Are you off your meds ” “Our hands are dirty ” Jules said.
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Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.
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Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.
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