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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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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Kind
Feeds
Nourishment
Level
Levels
Reading
Read
Write
Writing

More quotes by 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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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 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?
Jennifer Egan
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Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.
Jennifer Egan
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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.
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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Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.
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
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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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'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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Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.
Jennifer Egan
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I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I’m guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn’t there.
Jennifer Egan
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Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.
Jennifer Egan
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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.
Jennifer Egan
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It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.
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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If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.
Jennifer Egan
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And the question is, which one is really you.
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'm always happy, Sasha said. Sometimes I just forget.
Jennifer Egan