Jennifer Egan Quotes

109 quotes in 1769 categories

• 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.
• 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…
• I think the one thing that's changed over time is that I've come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think…
• One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.
• I guess it's always romantic when two people fall in love.... Even if it turns out not to be real.
• Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.
• Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,
• 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…
• Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.
• I was a stepchild in two different families. The hardest thing about being a stepchild is you know that in some way everything would be…
• Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.
• Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.
• I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
• 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…
• I'm a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.
• If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.
• That adage about 'Write what you know' is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I'm curious to find out.
• The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material.
• 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…
• 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…

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