List of Jennifer Egan Quotes

The Average Person Might Articulate Them Differently, But We All Think About Interpersonal Relationships In One Way Or Another. Writers Just Express That In Different Ways And Capture It In Different Ways. To Some Degree, We're All Thinking About The Same Things. It's The Zeitgeist. The Trick, In A Way, As A Writer, Is To Hope That Your Interests In Some Sense Link Up With The Culture Around You.

I Write My First Draft By Hand, At Least For Fiction. For Non-fiction, I Write Happily On A Computer, But For Fiction I Write By Hand, Because I'm Trying To Achieve A Kind Of Thoughtless State, Or An Unconscious Instinctive State. I'm Not Reading What I Write When I Wrote. It's An Unconscious Outpouring That's A Mess, And It's Many, Many Steps Away From Anything Anyone Would Want To Read. Creating That Way Seems To Generate The Most Interesting Material For Me To Work With, Though.

Music And Time Have Such An Interesting Relationship. Music Makes Time Fall Away Like Almost Nothing Else. You Hear A Song From Another Moment Of Your Life And It Really Is Like You're Still There. That's Why The Music Of Our Youth Ends Up Being Particularly Powerful. The Coming Of Age Music That You Grab A Hold Of As The Symbol Or The Expression Of Your Independence And Hopes For The Future And Anger And Rebellion Or Whatever It Is You're Feeling Is So Powerful For The Rest Of Your Life When You Hear It.

I Write Fiction Longhand. That's Not So Much About Rejecting Technology As Being Unable To Write Fiction On A Computer For Some Reason. I Don't Think I Would Write It On A Typewriter Either. I Write In A Very Blind Gut Instinctive Way. It Just Doesn't Feel Right. There's A Physical Connection. And Then In Nonfiction That's Not The Case At All. I Can't Even Imagine Writing Nonfiction By Hand.

I Guess In My Own Life, Privacy, Anonymity, And The Mystery Of Being Lost Are Important. I Also Feel That People Are Mysterious And Complex No Matter What They Do, And No Matter How Hard They Try To Reveal Their Own Mystery.

We're [writers] All Afraid Of Writing Badly, And There Are Psychological Reasons, Like The Bad Interior Of Ourselves Is Somehow Being Revealed, But We All Fear That, And You Can't Write Well If You're Not Willing To Write Badly. That's Why You Have To Make Writing A Habit, So It Feels Normal And Not Strange.

I Don't Think That All Girls Seek The Influence Of Older Men, But I Think Girls Whose Fathers Are Absent Or Recessed From Their Lives Often Do. And Honestly, When I Was Growing Up, Fathers Were Generally Pretty Absent From Their Children's Lives. We Didn't See A Lot Of Them. That May Be Something That Has Genuinely Changed For The Better In Our Culture: Men Are More Present For Their Children Now That More Women Are Working.

I Did Go On Safari In Kenya When I Was 17, With My Mother, Stepfather And Little Brother, And I Kept A Careful Journal Of The Experience That Was Very Helpful In Terms Of My Sensory Impressions Of Africa. I Have Traveled Quite A Bit At Distinct Times In My Life, Though Now That I Have Kids I've Settled Down.

But I Always Need To Identify With A Character To Write About Him Or Her - And By "identify," I Mean See The World Through That Person's Eyes And Have A Strong Sense Of The Inner Logic Of Their Acts And Decisions, Wacky Or Wrongheaded Though They Might Be. In That Sense, I Think There's Some Of Me In All Of Them.

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When Does A Fake Mohawk Become A Real Mohawk? Who Decides? How Do You Know If It's Happened?

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?