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I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Overlap
Worst
Write
Writing
Trying
Things
Life

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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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If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.
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I know I'm famous and irresitible - a combination whose properties closely resemble radioactivity - and I know that you in this room are helpless against me.
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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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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?
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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]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.
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Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.
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Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase meant to be--usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people.
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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.
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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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Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.
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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 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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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 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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If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.
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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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That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.
Jennifer Egan