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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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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Thinking
Badly
Block
Havens
Haven
Writer
Process
Writing
Flailing
Think
Involves

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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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And the question is, which one is really you.
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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.
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We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.
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Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.
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Being somewhere but not completely: that was home for Danny. . . . All he needed was a cellphone or I-access, or both at once, or even just a plan to leave wherever he was and go someplace else really really soon.
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th blu nyt th stRs u can't c th hum tht nevr gOs awy
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'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.
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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 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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Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them.
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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 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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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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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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I grew up in the 70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends. Before the age of technology, it was also easier to just disappear from the face of the earth.
Jennifer Egan
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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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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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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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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