Latest Jennifer Egan Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I grew up in the 70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends. Before the age of technology, it was also easier to just disappear from the face of the earth.

  Jennifer Egan

  Teenager, Technology, People

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• 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.

  Jennifer Egan

  Girl, Children, Growing Up

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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.

  Jennifer Egan

  People, Important, Trying

  "Jennifer Egan’s Novel Approach". Interview with Kiera Butler, www.motherjones.com. May 27, 2010.

• 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.

  Jennifer Egan

  Writing, Thinking, Technology

• I'm very interested in the way the Internet has changed teenage life. Obviously it's very different from when I grew up, when there weren't even answering machines, much less computers. I was telling my children this the other day, and the little one said, "Did you have electricity, Mom?" and I was like okay, enough, kid.

  Jennifer Egan

  Mom, Teenage, Children

  "Jennifer Egan’s Novel Approach". Interview with Kiera Butler, www.motherjones.com. May 27, 2010.

• 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.

  Jennifer Egan

  Song, Powerful, Fall

  "Jennifer Egan’s Novel Approach". Interview with Kiera Butler, www.motherjones.com. May 27, 2010.

• 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.

  Jennifer Egan

  Writing, Normal, Strange

  Source: www.avclub.com

• 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.

  Jennifer Egan

  Thinking, Average, Degrees

  Interview with Marah Eakin, www.avclub.com. October 13, 2016.

• 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.

  Jennifer Egan

  Writing, Ideas, Interesting

  Interview with Marah Eakin, www.avclub.com. May 12, 2011.

• 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.

  Jennifer Egan

  Reading, Writing, Hands

  Interview with Marah Eakin, www.avclub.com. May 12, 2011.