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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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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Like
Materials
Line
Drafts
Gets
Messy
Lines
Efforts
Effort
Unconscious
Best
Material
Firsts
Bottom
First
Blind

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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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That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.
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I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my services.
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Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.
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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.
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It's finished. Everything went past, without me.
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When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?
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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.
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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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I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.
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I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.
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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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I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
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th blu nyt th stRs u can't c th hum tht nevr gOs awy
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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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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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It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.
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What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
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Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.
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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.
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