Jennifer Egan

Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.

— Jennifer Egan

Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.

— Jennifer Egan

One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.

— Jennifer Egan

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

Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.

— Jennifer Egan

No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.

— Jennifer Egan

There are a lot of writers who find a groove and spend a career mining that vein. I seem to be exactly…

— Jennifer Egan

Oh we'll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone.

— Jennifer Egan

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…

— Jennifer Egan

To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is…

— Jennifer Egan

I felt unbelievably lucky to have the success I did with 'Goon Squad,' and I also felt the pressure of how fleeting…

— Jennifer Egan

I’m sorry and I believe in you and I’ll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I’ll…

— Jennifer Egan

Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life, and it really…

— Jennifer Egan

The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the…

— Jennifer Egan

Criticism is fine and conversation is fine, but the person who's criticizing should know what they're saying and whom they're criticizing.

— Jennifer Egan

You can start imagining all kinds of things characters would feel, but you have to have a sense of whether those imaginings…

— Jennifer Egan

Like many people of my generation, I feel like I survived my adolescent mischief only by a miracle, and it seems too…

— Jennifer Egan

“Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith…

— Jennifer Egan

People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had…

— Jennifer Egan

“Whenever his eyes happen to graze Mindy's, she senses shame on her behalf: because of her prettiness; because she sleeps with Lou;…

— Jennifer Egan

Proust, my big inspiration for 'Goon Squad,' uses music a lot in his novel, both in terms of plot and structure. I…

— Jennifer Egan

Nowadays I'm more interested in what you'd call 'alternative.' Lately we've been listening to a lot of Mumford & Sons, and Jenny…

— Jennifer Egan

When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon…

— Jennifer Egan

“Behind the desk was nothing but view-the whole city flung out in front of us the way street vendors fling out their…

— Jennifer Egan

I write to escape from my life. Writing about men separates 'me' from my work in a way that I find comforting.

— Jennifer Egan

Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?

— Jennifer Egan

They were snobs or idiots or both...yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness.

— Jennifer Egan

Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

— Jennifer Egan

I grew up in the 1970s, and my friends and I felt very keenly that we had missed the '60s. We were…

— Jennifer Egan

“He’d chanced upon his favorite hour: A premonition of dawn without any visible sign of it.”

— Jennifer Egan

Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.

— Jennifer Egan

Life itself is so surprising, a predictable story is unsatisfying.

— Jennifer Egan

He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints.

— Jennifer Egan

It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.

— Jennifer Egan

I'm a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.

— Jennifer Egan

I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer.

— Jennifer Egan

Not to brag, but I do think I've gotten pretty adept on PowerPoint... except that I can't figure out how to use…

— Jennifer Egan

I never did anything original my whole childhood. I was invisible.

— Jennifer Egan

“... see how everything now is precious, how someday I'll know I was lucky to be here.”

— Jennifer Egan

I number my drafts, and by the time a book is done, I'll have 75 or 80 drafts of some sections.

— Jennifer Egan