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Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.

Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Write
Stuff
Wells
Habitually
Well
Regularity
Writing
Enables
Good
Badly
Time
Present
Willing

More quotes by Jennifer Egan

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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 you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.
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This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
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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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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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Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.
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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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No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.
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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.
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Sure, everything is ending, Jules said, but not 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.
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.
Jennifer Egan
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I loved every minute of my childhood - sunbathing on the fire escape, digging for buried treasure in the back yard, pulling alewives out of the sand... Then it was all taken away from me. I came back every summer to visit my father until I was 18, but I was always the outsider.
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.
Jennifer Egan
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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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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
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I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.
Jennifer Egan
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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.
Jennifer Egan
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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.
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.
Jennifer Egan