Jennifer Egan Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Redemption, transformation
God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?
God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?
Americans are less selfish than some of our politicians believe and will respond with reason and resilience to passionate clarity.
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.
"You grew up, Alex.
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.
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.
[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
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?
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,
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.