Jennifer Egan quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jennifer Egan on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.

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

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.

Hindsight creates the illusion that your life has led you inevitably to the present moment.

But a story was invisible, infinite, it had no size or shape. Information. It could fill the world or fit inside a fingernail.

The monkey's face had more emotions than a human's: curiosity, pity, exhaustion, like he'd already seen too much. Danny had to look away.

There are so many things that can take a person somewhere else, but none of those things ever happened to me,

Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?

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

Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.

You said you were a fairy princess
You said you were a shooting star
You said we'd go to Bora Bora
Now look at where the fuck we are

And the feeling I had was not of wanting her so much as being surrounded by her, blundering inside her life without having moved.

That's how New York looked: like a gorgeous, easy thing to have, even for me.

But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.

Th blu nyt
th stRs u can't c
th hum tht nevr gOs awy

She looks like someone I want to know, or maybe even be.

The blue, mosquitoey night pushes in from the hotel windows.

and the question is, which one is really "you,

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

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.

Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.

Mindy felt a jolt of attraction roughly akin to having someone seize her intestines and twist.

It was the silliest victory of her entire life.

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.

I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." ...
"You grew up, Alex.

Kind of like saying 'no offense' when you've just said something offensive?

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.

Even the most secure houses achieve, in deep night, a state of relative unconsciousness.

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

Bernadette longs for this moment as if it had already passed, as if it could have been. Yet here it is.

Real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you ...

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.

That's factually crazy...

I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.

[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.

Power is like that; everyone feels it at once.

Jules turned to her, incredulous. 'Do you socialize with Republicans?'
'It happens, Jules.

I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.

NICOLE CULLEN Long Tom Lookout

if thr r childrn thr mst be a fUtr rt?

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

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

Bennie has light brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record.

The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material.

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

I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.

Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection;

Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.

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

What I Suddenly Understand
My job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life.
> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.

A swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt toward the rest of his staff

There are things you're just positive will happen to you. Then there's that second when you realize, Jesus Christ. Maybe they won't.

Then tell them, faintly, 'I heard screaming'. Men with a history of violence live in fear of retribution.

Time's a goon right? Isn't that the expression?

So this is it what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty.

A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasn't that a fairly accurate description of lust?

She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.

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

Noreen didn't speak, and as the minutes passed she seemed to fade into the rummaging breeze and chatter of insects, as if the night itself were alive.

The sound of the wind against the sides of the house is exactly like the sound of wolf fur against cardboard.

All her excitement had seeped away, leaving behind a terrible sadness, an emptiness that felt violent, as if she'd been gouged.

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.

I think, The world is actually huge. That's the part no one can really explain.

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 makes a person real?

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

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.

You can do it alone. But it's going to be so much harder.

That we have some history together that hasn't happened yet.

He sensed between them an understanding too deep to articulate: the unspeakable knowledge that everything is lost.

I turn to contemporary fiction seeking a shared awareness with the writer of the cultural moment we both occupy, its peculiar challenges.

...our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.

Her face was fragile and mischievous, pale enough to absorb hues from the world around her-purple, green, pink-like a face painted by Lucian Freud.

With an earnestness that would be laughable in a person who wasn't from Wisconsin.

I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don't listen to them - listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.

CRAIG DAVIDSON Medium Tough

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

The music industry is an interesting lens through which to look at change, because it has had such a difficult time adjusting to the digital age.

Reach isn't describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it's simultaneous.

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

See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.

Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.

And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.

That's what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.

When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?

Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.

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?

...water laughing softly down a black stone wall.

Skin-that smooth plump sweetly fragrant sac upon which life scrawls the record of our failures and exhaustion

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.

And it's all kind of moving and sweet except that you're not completely there - a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking,

Eyebrows have never inflicted a moment of pain on me.

It is technically impossible for a man to look better in a Speedo than in swim trunks.

I sensed immediately that he'd once been overweight. He moved with a fat person's tiptoey apology.

If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.

What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.

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

STEPHEN O'CONNOR Next to Nothing

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