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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.

Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Writing
Reading
Really
Moment
Way
Culture
Write
Moments
Live
Endangered
Wells
Simply
Well
Though

More quotes by Jennifer Egan

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I'm always happy, Sasha said. Sometimes I just forget.
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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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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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This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
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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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No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.
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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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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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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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Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.
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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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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 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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It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.
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A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.
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And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
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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.
Jennifer Egan
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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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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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Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.
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