Quote

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
Write
Stuff
Unafraid
Form
Badly
Better
Base
Writing
Forms
Something
Build
Willing
Often

More quotes by Jennifer Egan

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And the question is, which one is really you.
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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 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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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.
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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.
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I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
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Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.
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I'm always happy, Sasha said. Sometimes I just forget.
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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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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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No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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.
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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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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.
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Sure, everything is ending, Jules said, but not yet.
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