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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

More quotes by Jennifer Egan

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Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.
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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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The sky was electric blue above the trees but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldn't. The feeling was too deep.
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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.
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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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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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When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?
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I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I’m guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn’t there.
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It's finished. Everything went past, without me.
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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.
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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 am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
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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?
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No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.
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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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.
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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
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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.
Jennifer Egan
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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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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.
Jennifer Egan