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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.

Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Egan
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 7
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Strange
Associating
Winning
Hoped
Seems
Unbelievable
Hard
Directed
Work
Prize
Something
Journalist
Way
Somehow
Fiction

More quotes by Jennifer Egan

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Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.
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It's finished. Everything went past, without me.
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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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There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.
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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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I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.
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That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.
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I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
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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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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 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.
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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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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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[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.
Jennifer Egan
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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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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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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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Oh we'll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone.
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This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
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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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