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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.
Jennifer Egan
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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
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Illinois
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More quotes by Jennifer Egan
Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.
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Sure, everything is ending, Jules said, but not yet.
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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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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
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
There's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to.
Jennifer Egan
Technology makes everyone feel old. A laptop is old after two years. Someone always has something newer. Everyone seems to feel obsolete now, even the young.
Jennifer Egan
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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What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
Jennifer Egan
This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
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It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?
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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.
Jennifer Egan
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.
Jennifer Egan
Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn't stemmed the suspicion that people's opinions weren't really their own. Who's paying you? was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter - who would let themselves be bought?
Jennifer Egan
One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.
Jennifer Egan
Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.
Jennifer Egan
Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.
Jennifer Egan
I've never been that confident. I don't tend to think, swaggeringly, I'm going to ace this. It's just not who I am.
Jennifer Egan
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.
Jennifer Egan
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