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 just think that, for my particular personality, feeling slightly invisible is always a help.

— Jennifer Egan

Between books, I have to throw out everything I did before, because the tools I've used to write the previous book will…

— Jennifer Egan

As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.

— Jennifer Egan

I teach intermittently, and while I enjoy it, I don't find that it's a calling for me.

— 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

“Thousands of solar panels lift and tilt at the same time, in the same way. I clutch at Dad's arm: "Why are…

— Jennifer Egan

It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human…

— Jennifer Egan

I was a stepchild in two different families. The hardest thing about being a stepchild is you know that in some way…

— Jennifer Egan

“The seconds pass. I know what’s going on because it’s the same thing that always happens: give me something nice, something I…

— Jennifer Egan

I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any…

— Jennifer Egan

At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the…

— 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

Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want…

— Jennifer Egan

I was a stepchild in two different families. The hardest thing about being a stepchild is you know that in some way…

— Jennifer Egan

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. "I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking…

— Jennifer Egan

“Danny had no idea what the thing was. All he knew was that he lived more or less in a constant state…

— 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

“If we human beings are information processing machines, reading X's & O's and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly…

— Jennifer Egan

“At the beginning he’d thought of his style as being his essence, the perfect expression of who he was inside, but lately…

— Jennifer Egan

“since the Depression, we bankers have had the leisure and . . . solitude, you might say, to think about the future. The Civil War…

— Jennifer Egan

It's our job as fiction writers to provide a delight that nothing else can - to such a degree that people have…

— Jennifer Egan

“Power is like that; everyone feels it at once.”

— Jennifer Egan

The part of the process that's exciting to me is feeling like I'm in a place I've never been before, in every…

— Jennifer Egan

“There were rumors at the high school of girls who’d had to depart suddenly to “live with relations.” One of these, Loretta…

— Jennifer Egan