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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
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Ideas
Come
Need
Needs
Intellectual
Really
Question
Time
Started
Start
Place

More quotes by 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.
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Stu walked Bennie over to Chris in the chair and parted his hair to reveal some tan little creatures the size of poppy seeds moving around on his scalp. Bennie felt himself grow faint.'Lice' the barber whispered.'They get it at school'. 'But he goes to private school' Bernie had blurted.'In Crandale,New York!
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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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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.
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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?
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I'm always happy, Sasha said. Sometimes I just forget.
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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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So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.
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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.
Jennifer Egan
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I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.
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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.
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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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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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That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.
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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.
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’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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th blu nyt th stRs u can't c th hum tht nevr gOs awy
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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.
Jennifer Egan
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I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.
Jennifer Egan