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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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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Selfish
Passionate
Politician
Americans
Less
Resilience
Reason
Respond
Believe
Clarity
Politicians

More quotes by Jennifer Egan

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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.
Jennifer Egan
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What I Suddenly Understand My job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life. ---> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.
Jennifer Egan
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Oh we'll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone.
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 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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This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
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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Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.
Jennifer Egan
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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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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.
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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Sure, everything is ending, Jules said, but not yet.
Jennifer Egan
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Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?
Jennifer Egan
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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.
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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Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them.
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 haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.
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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I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
Jennifer Egan