Jennifer Egan Quotes

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.

I’m sorry and I believe in you and I’ll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I’ll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life.

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

He remembered his mentor, Lou Kline, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. They'd been in Lou's house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Lou always had, his car collection out front, and Bennie had looked into his idol's famous face and thought, You're finished. Nostalgia was the end - everyone knew that.

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

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.

Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase "meant to be"--usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people.

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's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to.

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

The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I guess it's always romantic when two people fall in love.... Even if it turns out not to be real.

happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being “inside” and being “outside,” that it all came down to X’s and O’s that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.

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.

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

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 basic mindset.

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.

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

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.

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.

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.

I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. 'Goon Squad' provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out 'The Who,' which was my absolute favorite band.

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

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I’m guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn’t there.

She was clean": no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?

Technology makes everyone feel old. A laptop is old after two years. Someone always has something newer. Everyone seems to feel obsolete now, even the young.

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

I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my services.

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

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

I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn’t have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.

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

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

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.

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

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 that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.

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

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

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.

Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.

some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.